EPiSODE 71.

“Most great art has been commission work. Bernini didn’t sit around making statues because he liked making statues, he did it because Pope So-and-so wanted a bust of himself on his elaborate tomb… Rembrandt, I’m sure, would’ve been happier doing something other than painting fat businessmen most of his life.”

No name is as synonymous with the art of novelization as “Alan Dean Foster,” known for his work reverse engineering novels out of films like The Thing, Alien and, most of all, Star Wars. We’re joined by the prolific sci-fi author to discuss his storied career - the novelizations, continuation novels and even the original work - in the context of his recent dispute with the Disney corporation over unpaid royalties after their acquisition of Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox.

We start at the beginning with his adaptation of a crummy Italian gender-swapped Tarzan rip-off before the conversation explores everything from when Frank Franzetta’s artwork suggests stories far more compelling than the source they’re portraying, why world-building in novelistic writing is the same in original stories or adaptations, and how he came to write the first Star Wars expanded universe novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (which spawned an entire ecosystem of ancillary material.)

Foster is a legend in his field and this discussion explores his crucial role in modern pop culture and why the Disney company’s ambivalence about paying him the royalty money he’s unquestionably owed is so repellent in a larger context that extends beyond Foster himself.

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