James Nicoll Reviews

Alan Dean Foster’s 1983 The Man Who Used the Universe is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Kees vaan Loo-Macklin, impoverished resident of industrial planet Evenwraith, joins a criminal gang because that seems to the coldly logical young man his best chance to survive long enough to pursue better goals. His boss. Lal, is suspicious of the new recruit, who doesn’t seem to have any personal vices. Anything Lal can’t understand could be a threat. Lal knows how to handle threats.

Lal orders Loo-Macklin to carry out a contract killing. The target has been previously attacked and has defeated all attackers. Loo-Macklin may be being sent to his death. But if he survives… Lal has arranged for a very special reward.

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Alan Dean Foster’s 1984 Voyage to the City of the Dead is a standalone novel set in his Humanx Commonwealth setting.

Eager to explore the mysteries of Tslamaina — Horseye to off-worlders — scientists Etienne and Lyra Redowl have been waiting impatiently for permission from the native authorities to explore far up the Barshajagad canyon along the course of the spectacular river Skar. 

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Alan Dean Foster’s 1982 Nor Crystal Tears is a standalone SF novel. However, it shares a setting with other novels in Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth.

The partnership of insectile Thranx and mammalian humans created a galactic power. How did this union come to be?

It started with a ship full of hideous alien monsters.

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Alan Dean Foster’s 1974 Icerigger is the first volume in the Icerigger Trilogy. It is set in Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth. 

Interstellar salesman Ethan Frome Fortune planned to visit the desolate iceworld Tran-ky-ky just long enough to sell some knickknacks. Instead, he stumbled over a kidnapping in progress. Fortune’s inopportune appearance was only the first thing that went wrong with the kidnappers’ plans. 

One shuttle crash later and Fortune and his companions are trapped on Tran-ky-ky. The wrong side of Tran-ky-ky, thousands of kilometers from the only Commonwealth base on the planet… 

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1976’s Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker is Alan Dean Foster’s (uncredited) novelization of the initial script for George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New Hope.(Not called that at the time of first release, as y’all no doubt know.)

Former Senator Palpatine’s quest to make the galaxy great again has transformed a troubled republic into a brutal autocracy. Here and there, out-numbered rebels are trying to resist oppression. All verys ad, but what does it have to do with farm boy Luke Skywalker, stuck on backward desert world Tatooine?

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1972’s The Tar-Aiym Krang was the first in the seventeen to date¹ volumes of the Pip & Flinx series, the first book in the more than thirty to date Humanx Commonwealth Universe volumes and as far as I can tell, the very first book Alan Dean Foster ever wrote. That is a lot of firsts for one little book. How does it stand up forty-four years later?

Purchased on a whim by Mother Mastiff, Flinx is, by age sixteen, a talented thief and an experienced street performer. He has no idea that one seemingly minor encounter is going to catapult him from the only home he has ever known into a life of interstellar adventure.

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I would have been willing to bet actual cash money — well, Canadian money — that if an Alan Dean Foster book were to be featured in this series, it would have been the first book in the Flinx series, The Tar-Aiym Krang. But that book doesn’t have a Michael Whelan cover¹ and 1977’s With Friends Like These… does. Sometimes I choose books on the basis of their covers. I am just that shallow.

With Friends Like These… wasn’t Alan Dean Foster’s first collection. Very early in his career he began doing novelizations (many novelizations²) and by the end of 1977, he had already written no less than nine Star Trek Logs, based on the animated Star Trek scripts. I do think that this book was his first collection of non-tie-in works; the stories in it are among his first published stories.

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