He and his wife, Jo Ann Oxley, have traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first Star Trek movie. He has also novelized Star Wars movies as well as such well-known films as Alien and its two sequels. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving. The New York Timesbestselling author of more than one hundred ten books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction.Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, but first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. Alan Dean Foster's brilliant new novel is a near-future thriller that has all the dark humor and edgy morality of an Elmore Leonard mystery, in addition to the masterly world-building and quirky but believable characters readers expect from Foster. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as 'Star Wars', the first three 'Alien' films, 'Alien Nation', and 'The Chronicles of Riddick'. Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. Five collections of his short work have been published. Since then, Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all major science fiction magazines and anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was published by Ballantine Books in 1972. His writing career began in 1968 when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster's in 1968 and published it as a short story.
After receiving Bachelors and Master's degrees at UCLA, he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, California PR firm. Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles.