“At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book … [but] he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of … invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.”
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
As promised last night, I am continuing to follow that story about Disney refusing to pay Alan Dean Foster the royalties he is contractually owed for several novelizations of popular films, including Star Wars. Here is the text of the letter that Foster wrote to the corporate overlords (addressed with tongue in cheek to “Mickey” — as in Mickey Mouse — because he’s been unable to even learn the name of someone he could speak with):
Dear Mickey,
We have a lot in common, you and I. We share a birthday: November 18. My dad’s nickname was Mickey. There’s more.
When you purchased Lucasfilm, you acquired the rights to some books I wrote. STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film. SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE, the first sequel novel. You owe me royalties on these books. You stopped paying them.
When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written. The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3. You’ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.
All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I’d very much like my minuscule (though it’s not small to me) share.
You want me to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before even talking. I’ve signed a lot of NDAs in my 50-year career. Never once did anyone ever ask me to sign one prior to negotiations. For the obvious reason that once you sign, you can no longer talk about the matter at hand. Every one of my representatives in this matter, with many, many decades of experience in such business, echo my bewilderment.
You continue to ignore requests from my agents. You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me. Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer. How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?
My wife has serious medical issues and, in 2016, I was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. We could use the money. Not charity: just what I’m owed. I’ve always loved Disney. The films, the parks, growing up with the Disneyland TV show. I don’t think Unca Walt would approve of how you are currently treating me. Maybe someone in the right position just hasn’t received the word, though after all these months of ignored requests and queries, that’s hard to countenance. Or as a guy named Bob Iger said….
“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
I’m not feeling it.
Alan Dean Foster
Prescott, AZ
Disney is evidently hoping to outlast him and anyone else who has a complaint. They have nearly infinite resources to pay for lawyers, whereas a working writer or artist… does not. So they figure they can just stonewall until the plaintiff runs out of cash, loses interest… or in Foster’s case, quite possibly, dies. It’s the same tactic Donald Trump has historically employed to screw over honest contractors who were dumb enough to take jobs for him. It’s appalling, it’s immoral, it’s sleazy… let’s be frank, it’s evil.
And Mary Robinette Kowal, the president of SFWA, has pointed out that there’s a much larger concern here beyond one artist getting screwed:
If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.
There does seem to be a growing outcry over this, from Star Wars fans and other authors alike, including heavyweights like Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Will it be enough to sway the evil Mouse empire? Who knows… but this is not a good look for them.
You know, I’ve had a lot of long dark nights of the soul over how my life turned out… my failure to make my dream of becoming a novelist come true. There are a lot of reasons why it didn’t happen, some within my control, some without. The biggest one is that I just… got busy. As lame and unsatisfying as that sounds, it’s true. Life happened. And I have flagellated myself endlessly over it, just certain that my failure was the result of a character flaw… that I was too lazy, too easily distracted, too… I don’t know… too weak to put my nose to the grindstone. I have imagined that there’s an alternate-universe me who somehow got it right and lives that fabulous life I’ve always dreamed of, who writes and does book tours for six or eight months of the year and then travels the rest of the time. (Something like I’ve always imagined Alan Dean Foster, a well-known world traveler, does.) I still long to live that life, or at least to write a single book, just to say I did it.
Except… in recent years, as the relentless march of digital technology has gutted traditional publishing and I’ve gotten to know some real writers and seen just how damn hard it really is… I don’t know anymore that I want to write as a career. The writing part, the actual work of putting words to paper, is the easy bit. The rest is marketing, and the industry around that is cutthroat and only getting worse, and the odds of any actually making a living as a writer are getting smaller all the time. Maybe I’m only telling myself that to console myself; maybe it’s a classic case of sour grapes. But I don’t think so. I do still hope to write that novel, at least one novel, some day. But an industry that functions like publishing apparently does today, where a massive conglomerate like Disney that has more money than god can nevertheless contrive to pinch pennies owed to a man with 50 years of success under his belt, pennies that they wouldn’t even freaking miss… do I really want to be part of that? Why would anybody want to be part of that?
Source for the quotations above.
I doubt my Loyal Readers will be surprised to learn that the first “grown-up” book I ever read was Star Wars, the novelization of the movie that was ostensibly written by George Lucas, but actually was ghost written by a dude named Alan Dean Foster.
The second grown-up book I ever read was Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, a sequel to Star Wars written by that same Alan Dean Foster, and the first of what has now become known as the “Star Wars Expanded Universe” of tie-in novels, comics and games… an empire that rivals Palpatine’s in its reach and wealth.
I think it’s fair to say that Foster was my favorite author when I was a kid, both for his original works and for his novelizations of popular films. He was the king of them during the ’70s and ’80s, adapting everything from the aforementioned Star Wars to Clash of the Titans. I read all of them over and over again because for me, especially in the pre-home-video era, they were the best way to recapture the experience of those beloved movies. In fact, at one point, I probably read more novelizations — and in particular the novelizations of Alan Dean Foster, because he was the best in this category — than anything else.
So when I heard earlier today that Foster would be delivering a virtual press conference along with the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America about something important, my antenna went up. The virtual conference was livestreamed on Facebook and is still there on SFWA’s page, if you want watch it, but the short version is this: When Disney acquired Lucasfilm, it also acquired Foster’s Star Wars books. And when Disney acquired Fox, it acquired his novelizations of Alien, Aliens and Alien 3. All of these books are still in print and still making money for their owner, which is now, of course, Disney.
And Disney has stopped paying Foster the royalties he’s owed.
Moreover, they refuse to even speak with Foster, his agents, or SFWA about the matter, apparently believing that they acquired the rights to those contracts but not the obligations thereof.
As a fan of Foster, a fan of Star Wars and Alien, as a would-be novelist myself who once thought the coolest thing in the world would be to have Foster’s job, I am infuriated. This is absolute bullshit, the apotheosis of corporate evil and of unfair, 800-pound-gorilla behavior. And here’s the thing: If the Mouse is screwing over Alan Dean Freaking Foster, a hugely successful novelist with a 50-year track record, what are they doing to other writers who don’t have his name or professional savvy?
I’ll be following this story…
Star Wars Memories: My Time In The (Death Star) Trenches by Craig Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hugely enjoyable read filled with anecdotes about the early days of the Star Wars phenomenon, the years between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, by someone who was actually there. Lots of stuff in there I was vaguely aware of but didn’t know the details, and lots of things I didn’t know about at all. There are some unfortunate proofreading errors and layout issues, but the charm of the author’s voice and of the stories he tells helped me overlook those. If you’re a fan of a certain age, or are just interested in learning about what Star Wars was like before it became an industry, this is highly recommended.
I’ve lately been revisiting Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a science fiction novel I first read back in high school, or perhaps even middle school. My understanding at the time was that it was considered one of the great classics of the genre, but now, thirty-some years later, I rarely encounter any mention of it. That baffles me, a bit, but I suppose it speaks to the impermanence of everything, including prestige. That’s an idea that’s been very hard for me to accept even as it’s become more and more obvious to me. When I was younger, I naively believed that so many of the things I loved were timeless and would never go out of fashion or become irrelevant to the generations that would follow mine. I believed it as much as I believed the sun would come up tomorrow. Well, time has proven me wrong; in the past 30 years, just about every bit of art or media I ever loved has been remade, deconstructed, found lacking, or just plain forgotten. Even tangible things like cars no longer carry the same importance to young people that they did to my generation, and certainly to our parents. But that’s probably a full post in itself, and I’m here to talk about Ringworld.
It’s been interesting to discover what I remember and don’t remember about this book. For example, I very clearly recalled the opening scene, in which our protagonist, Louis Wu, tries to prolong his 200th birthday by using teleportation to jump around the globe, keeping one hour ahead of midnight for as long as possible. I remembered the alien race known as “puppeteers,” something like two-headed ostriches whose entire species are congenital cowards who are obsessed with absolute safety. I also remembered that the puppeteers moved their entire homeworld and several supporting satellites through space, rather than building spaceships, and that their idea of a weapon is something called a “tasp,” which stimulates the pleasure center of the target’s brain to render them passive and harmless, essentially an orgasm gun.
But there was one passage early on in the book that truly startled me. It’s brief, only a single paragraph, and I had no memory of it. Not a line, not a word, has stayed with me over the years, at least not in my conscious memory. But the meaning of this paragraph is so close to my thinking and to things I’ve actually said over the years, that I wonder if maybe it did stick in my unconscious all those years ago. Maybe it’s been lurking there for three decades, influencing my feelings. Or maybe it’s just coincidental, and it stands out to me now because it mirrors a thought and a feeling that I long ago came to of my own accord. The endless mystery of literature, I suppose… does it influence us or does it resonate with us because it strikes a chord that already exists?
Anyhow, here’s the passage that I’ve been mulling over for several days:
Long ago, Louis Wu had stood at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Louis’s eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Louis Wu, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see?
How many times have I thought that there simply isn’t enough time in a scant human lifespan to do and see everything there is to do and see? That’s the fundamental appeal to me of stories about immortal beings, like Highlander or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles… the ability to see and do and be many different things. My bucket list is as long as my leg, travel destinations primarily, places and things I want to see… and the list only seems to get longer over time, not shorter, in spite of my not-inconsiderable efforts to check items off. I’ll be 50 years old in only two months… not yet old, there’s still time, but I’m considerably down the road. Far enough to see that the road is limited. And how am I going to be able to see all there is to see when the end of the road is just down there a-ways?
Heavy thoughts from an old science fiction novel on a hot summer afternoon…
“As for … the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past.
“It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.
“Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country — Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva’s Zion, Smith’s Nauvoo, and a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.
“Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not — but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck.
“Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening — particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.”
— Robert A. Heinlein,
“Concerning Stories Never Written” (the afterword to Revolt in 2100)
It is worth noting that Heinlein wrote those words in the 1950s. And also that in his “Future History” cycle of science fiction stories, which includes Revolt in 2100, he pegged the late 20th century and much of the 21st as “The Crazy Years” when America becomes a puritanical theocracy, and spaceflight and other technological and scientific advancement all but ceases. With today’s Supreme Court decision not to put a stop to partisan gerrymandering, anti-abortion and “freedom of religion” laws springing up all over the place, Mitch McConnell’s heavy-handed and nakedly obvious power plays, and of course a president who has made it plain he’d rather rule as a dictator than govern as an elected official bound by rules and procedure, I fear we are living through the early phase of The Crazy Years right now…
Nothing much to say here, I just liked something I read during my morning commute. One of the most common scenes in any Star Wars-related novel is, of course, an enemy fighter getting pasted by the Millennium Falcon‘s mighty quad-mounted laser turrets. I’ve read countless variations on that theme over the years, and I imagine it’s an immense challenge for a writer to find some way of making it fresh and interesting. But I thought this particular instance was done with a lot of panache:
The enemy wriggled off the hook once more, but this one made an error, too: he got sore. Veering in a wide, angry, predictable loop, he came back to have his vengeance. Instead, he got four parallel pulsed beams of raw fusion-reactor output straight in the helmet visor.
And exploded, showering space with incandescent atoms.
That’s from Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon by L. Neil Smith… kudos, sir!
My recent joyful reaction to the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story not only reinvigorated my attitude about the whole damn Star Wars franchise, it also inspired me to revisit the original early adventures of Han and Lando: the Han Solo novels by Brian Daley, and the Lando Calrissian adventures by L. Neil Smith.
The Daley books are old favorites of mine, as I’ve surely mentioned before. I’ve read them many, many times, especially the first two — Han Solo at Star’s End and Han Solo’s Revenge. The Lando books, on the other hand… I’m not sure I even got around to reading all three of them back in the day. I want to say I only got through the first two in the trilogy, and I’m certain I’ve never gone back to them in all the decades since. And looking back now, I can’t really say why. I have a vague memory of thinking they didn’t feel very much like Star Wars to me, as if they were pre-existing works that the author had simply retrofitted with new character names. But I think it’s far more likely that it was simply bad timing. They were published the same summer that Return of the Jedi was first released in theaters, 1983, and it really felt back then as if the whole thing was just… over. Factor in my age at the time — I was thirteen going on fourteen — and I think there’s a good chance I was simply ready to turn my attention to, shall we say, other things. (I’m talking about girls, if that’s not obvious.)
It’s a bit of a shame, really, as I find I’m enjoying the Lando books perfectly well this time around. They’re as “Star Wars-y” as any of the other tie-in novels I’ve read, and I can easily visualize Donald Glover — the young Lando we see in the Solo movie — having these adventures a couple years prior to the events of that film. (It probably helps that Glover’s Lando explicitly references a couple things from these books during the movie, a deliberate Easter egg for old-school fans like myself.) There is, however, one aspect of these books that’s bringing me down a bit, and that’s L. Neil Smith’s tendency to insert really awful jokes based on 20th century Earthly consumer goods. In the first volume, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, there’s a throwaway line about “Lyme’s rose juice,” which would’ve gone right over my head when I was 13 but now instantly clicks as a play on the Rose’s lime juice I use to make cocktails with. I know, right? As bad as that is, though, Smith tops it in the second book, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon.
The Flamewind is a natural phenomenon in the star system Lando is visiting in this book, an effect caused by the local solar wind interacting with magnetic fields to fill the space between the system’s worlds with brilliant colors, something like the aurora borealis here on Earth. Neat idea… but tell me this doesn’t make you want to groan:
Outside, a braid of raspberry red, lemon yellow, and orange orange twisted through the heavens, across a constellation locals called the Silly Rabbit.
Now, maybe that doesn’t mean anything to Millennials and Gen-Zs, but for we Xers who grew up on Saturday morning cartoons and all the junk food that was advertised in between them…
Silly Rabbit indeed. Sigh.
The Earhart Betrayal by James Stewart Thayer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of the enduring ideas about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart is the notion that her attempted around-the-world flight was a cover for some sort of covert activity… that she was a spy, essentially, and that she did not die in the ocean or on some lonely speck of land somewhere, but was in fact captured by the Japanese. That idea forms the basis for this novel, a nifty thriller set in post-war Singapore. An American intelligence operative and his wife arrive to investigate evidence that Earhart died in a nearby POW camp. But what ought to be a simple milk run turns out to be the entry into something much bigger and more dangerous. The couple quickly find themselves mired in the intrigue surrounding a priceless jade elephant stolen during the war and now sought by several powerful individuals, while long-simmering ethnic tensions threaten to boil over. The sense of place is particularly well done; the sweaty, oppressive environment is practically a character on it own. In addition, the human characters are all colorful, the action brutal, and the revelations unexpected, and underlying all of it is a plausible explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century… what really happened to Amelia Earhart? An excellent summertime hammock read.
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything by John D. MacDonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A recent conversation about TV movies of the ’70s reminded me of this story, which I recall as a pleasantly cute film starring Robert Hays and Pam Dawber of Mork & Mindy fame. That conversation sent me questing for the original novel. Like the movie, the book is pleasantly cute: the story of a nebbishy young man named Kirby whose eccentric uncle dies and leaves him a mysterious gold watch and a big mess of trouble. It seems this watch has the ability to stop time for whoever is holding it, which was the secret behind the uncle’s unlikely success in life, and now there are unscrupulous people who want that power for themselves. In the wrong hands, the watch could unleash chaos on the world. Can Kirby uncover the secrets of the watch, outsmart the bad guys, and discover the self-confidence his uncle believed he has within him?
Written in 1962, the book is unquestionably a product of the Mad Men era, with all the pros and cons you might imagine. The recurring theme of Kirby’s sexual inadequacy, his inability to get laid and the suggestion that he’s not a real man because he doesn’t know how to score, is rather jarring to modern sensibilities, while his love interest Bonnie wouldn’t feel out of place in an Austin Powers movie. (She’s a groovy babe, you see.) Yes, this is a sexist book, but it’s made palatable by the fact that Kirby is more hapless than predatory, and the female characters are in fact the competent ones, the ones with the power to make things happen. It’s also presented in a lighthearted, broadly humorous style that’s difficult to dislike. Ultimately, if you can look past its dated elements, it’s a harmless bit of fun from another time.
And now I want to see that TV movie again…
The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I suspect this potboiler would’ve been entirely forgotten by now if not for the classic 1972 disaster movie it inspired.
While the film followed the book’s plot fairly closely — the screenplay shuffles around a few major events and pares away some characters — the two properties are very different in tone. Gallico presents us with a group of unlikable characters who are all, to one degree or another, the last person with whom you’d want to be trapped in a life-and-death struggle. It isn’t merely a case of these people being flawed and having to find their individual strengths or rise above their weaknesses, which is how the movie presented them. These people are genuine jerks, in particular the vacationing police detective Rogo (played by Ernest Borgnine in the movie) and even the ostensible hero, the Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman in the movie). Scott is an especially frustrating character because the reader never fully learns what it is that’s driving him. There are some hints, things that the movie expanded upon, but on the page he remains a cypher. As for Rogo, he has some redeeming, humanizing moments toward the end, but it comes across as too little, too late, especially as those moments are counteracted by one sneering comment he makes in the final pages.
In addition to the obnoxiousness of the characters, the book fairly drips with anti-Semitism, misogyny (lots of “don’t worry your pretty little head” types of attitudes), and homophobia. Possibly this simply reflects the attitudes of the time — it was first published in 1969, the year I was born — but it’s difficult going for the modern reader.
As for the writing, well, Gallico’s style is serviceable at best. There are occasional glimmers of poetry, nice images here and there, but there’s also a whole lot of clunky prose and info-dumps in between them. And the dialog is incredibly stilted.
And yet, I have to confess that the book held my interest. It was a genuine pageturner infused throughout with an authentic tension and claustrophobic feeling, as well as a sense of relief when our survivors are rescued at the end, followed by a sadness at their realization that they’ll likely never see each other again. For that emotional response alone, I’m giving the book a positive rating. If you’re a fan of the movie, it’s worth a look to see where the film came from.
But believe me, this is the rare case where the movie was better than the book.