The Icerigger Trilogy

A Biography of Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster (b. 1946) is the bestselling author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels. His prolific output and accessible style have made him one of the nation’s foremost speculative fiction writers.

Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles and attended ’filmmaking school at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1960s. There he befriended George Lucas, with whom he would later collaborate. Rather than trying to break into Hollywood, however, Foster took a job writing copy for an advertising firm in Studio City, California, where he remained for two years, honing the craft that he would soon put to use when writing novels.

His first break came when the Arkham Collector, a small horror magazine, bought a letter Foster had written in the style of suspense legend H. P. Lovecraft. Encouraged by this sale, Foster began work on his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang (1972), which introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, his most enduring creation. He went on to set more than twenty novels in the Humanx universe; of these, Midworld (1975) is among his most acclaimed works.

The Tar-Aiym Krang was also the first of the Pip and Flinx series. The hero, Flinx, is an orphan thief whose telepathic powers hold the key to finding his parents and understanding his identity. Foster has chronicled the adventures of Flinx, and his acid-breathing sidekick Pip, in fourteen novels, and has explored their universe in fourteen other stand-alone works.

In 1983, Foster began the eight-book Spellsinger series, about a college student trapped in a magical dimension. He also wrote the Icerigger trilogy, published between 1974 and 1987. In 1990, his stand-alone novel Cyber Way received the Southwest Book Award for Fiction, making Foster the first science fiction writer to win this prize. Foster has also found success writing novelizations of Hollywood films, including the Alien trilogy, Star Wars: A New Hope (in which he expanded Lucas’s idea into an entire universe), and the 2009 Star Trek movie.

In addition to creating imaginary planets, Foster travels extensively throughout our world. After finishing college, he spent a summer in the South Pacific, camping in French Polynesia and living with a family of Tahitian policemen. He has scuba dived on unexplored reefs, pan-fried piranha in the “green hell” of Peru’s jungle, and captured film footage of great white sharks’ feeding frenzies in Australia—which was used by a BBC documentary series. These and other adventures are the basis of his travel memoir Predators I Have Known (2011).

Foster is an avid athlete who hikes, bodysurfs, and once studied karate with Chuck Norris. Since taking up powerlifting—at the age sixty-one—he has won numerous world and regional titles. He and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a home built of brick salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miner’s brothel.