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If this interview reads like two guys sitting around talking about
Science Fiction, well that’s what it is. I got out my tape recorder,
started it up, and took some notes as we went along.
Mr. Foster's family was involved in Hollywood. His uncle was a
TV producer, so he knows a lot of folk there. He speaks unassumingly
about movie producers, and such, as if they aren't celebrities - they're
his work buddies. He went out of his way to make time for this interview
(in the middle of a busy schedule). In short, he's a normal, congenial
fellow who lives in Arizona, but does a lot of business in L.A. Rumor has
it that he kept John Carpenter upstairs waiting while we taped this
interview.
Roberts:
A little background first - what writers did you like to read when
you first started reading Science Fiction?
Foster:
Eric Frank Russell was and still is my favorite Science Fiction
writer. I also really liked Murry Leinster, who I thought the best
pure storyteller. And Robert Sheckley, I still consider the most
inventive Science Fiction short story writer in the field.
Roberts:
He certainly has a wonderful sense of the absurd.
Foster:
Not just the absurd, but his invention of . . . of different slants
on aliens and on people . . . it was the sort of creativeness that
most people would take and turn into a novel, and he would just
throw them out one after another - particularly in the 50’s and the
60’s. One short story after another, you would look at it and say,
"Wow, you could get a whole book out of this!" He’d do it over and
over and over again. It was like watching a magic act and trying to
figure out the trick.
Roberts:
Some of your work is like that, too.
Foster:
I’m flattered by the comparison.
Roberts:
Icerigger was just fascinating.
Foster:
I had a lot of fun with that. I do like to travel to a lot of different
places, trying to see as much of the planet as possible. Since I can’t
go off it, I invent the places I’d like to go and set stories there. And
so, that’s why I do it.
Roberts:
I understand they’ve turned a story from the Montezuma Strip short stories
into a TV movie.
Foster:
Its apparently a new TV anthology series. Its a one-hour show. Its supposed
to be on Monday night at seven o’clock on the Science Fiction channel. I’m
curious to see what they did with it myself.
Roberts:
Well, everyone will have seen it by the time they read this. *
Foster:
Yes, of course, including me, hopefully, if I get home in time.
Roberts:
Do you know if we’re going to be seeing any more Montezuma Strip stories on TV?
Foster:
The company that’s doing this one has optioned another story. And there is
another production company that wants to option the other three stories for
development as a possible series.
Roberts:
So, if they do a TV series, you’ll be writing more Montezuma Strip stories?
Foster:
Oh, yeah, absolutely, and I’ll be adapting the ones that have already been
done that haven’t been produced yet. At least, I hope I will. But, at the
very least, I think I’ll be the story editor. What I’d like to do is to
write as much of it myself as I can, and if I simply can’t handle the load
because of time constraints and other commitments, I’d like to take some of
the classic cyber-punk Science Fiction stories by people like Gibson and
Sterling and Williams and all the usual suspects - those that are malleable
enough to fit the Montezuma Strip setting - (provided that the authors would
like to see them on television, of course) and fit them in. Get these guys
some TV credits. That’s what I wanted to do with Star Trek once. It would
have been a series, and Roddenberry said I would be the story editor of that
show, but well, it didn’t come off, needless to say.
Roberts:
Your latest paperback is Parallelities**. I liked it a lot. What can you
tell me about what prompted you to write it - what put the idea in your head?
Foster:
Well, its very flattering to be asked to do sequels . . . I have a number of
series on-going . . . there’s a fantasy trilogy from Warner . . . but occasionally
I’ll get an idea in my head that doesn’t fit into any of the series that I’m
working on, or anything that I want to do with a series. Its a one-shot, as its
called. And I had never done a parallel worlds novel, and a lot of the parallel
worlds novels that I had read or read about involved people moving between
different worlds, but they never encountered themselves.
I thought it would be very interesting to do a story where a guy gets trapped in
a situation where he has no control over the worlds he moves through, unlike
something like Sliders, for example - where he just never knows from minute to
minute what world he’s going to be in. How he adapts to it, whether he’s going
to run into another version of himself, or different versions of himself . . . I
just thought there were new things that could be done with the parallel worlds
idea, and that’s why I wrote the book.
Roberts:
Foster:
Roberts:
What can you tell us about Carnivores of Light and Darkness?
Foster:
Carnivores of Light and Darkness is my first foray into heroic fantasy.
I did it because I was looking to do something different one day, and I hadn’t
done heroic fantasy.
It was originally conceived as a trilogy - it reads as one long book, if you
just put it in one volume. I again wanted to try to do some different things,
at least things that I perceived to be different than what was being done in
the field, and that’s the only way that I could really amuse myself - enjoy
myself - while I was writing it. All three books are done, its just a matter
of when they’ll be published by Warner. The second book is called Into the
Thinking Kingdoms***, the third book is called, tentatively, A Triumphany
of Souls, but we’ll see if they change the title. Publishers don’t like
literary titles particularly.
At this point, I paused the tape recorder, having asked all my prepared
questions. I drew a blank, trying to think of a way to wrap up the interview.
I explained my predicument to Mr. Foster. He suggested that I ask how he
became interested in Science Fiction. He said the answer involved collecting,
and would be just right for this publication. It was.
Roberts:
How did you become interested in Science Fiction?
Foster:
My father read Science Fiction. My uncle, who was a producer - Howard Horriwitz,
did Batman on Television, Seventy Seven Sunset Strip [a TV show about Hollywood
detectives], and other shows - was a Science Fiction fan. I started reading
[Science Fiction] when I was in sixth grade. I put it aside for a while - picked
it up again in High School and College, and started buying first editions. Because
you could find things like signed limited fantasy first editions for five bucks on
Hollywood Blvd. and nice used book stores back in those days. I don't collect
much any more, but I kept my collection, and I get a huge kick out of seeing
the prices that some of the books that I paid five bucks for are bringing in
Barry Webbins Catalogue [not sure I transcribed that right - PR], and other
notable dealers now.
Of course, that's a typical function of collecting. Things that people used
and discarded ten years or fifty years or a hundred years ago are the most
valuable today. So, I started as a collector, and I still have a collector's
eye. I stiil like going going into the bookroom and checking out states. Once
you start looking at book jackets, you never stop looking at book jackets. So,
the collector isn't dead in me, its just sort of dormant.
Roberts:
Thank you very much, Mr. Foster!
Foster:
* "Our Lady of the Machine" appeared as an episode in the series "Welcome
to Paradox" on the Science Fiction Channel on Monday, August 17, 1998.
** Parallelities is due out in October 1998, but there were copies at the
convention. I have a signed copy of the book for the winner of our
Trivia Contest. See Reader’s Bookshelf next month to
see who won.
*** The dustcover of Carnivores of Light and Darkness proclaims
that the next book in this series will be titled In the Pale of Overthinking,
but Mr. Foster indicated on a panel the day before this interview that Warner kept
changing the title. No one seems to know what the title will be when published.
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