Introduction
Alan Dean Foster
Prescott, Arizona
June, 2018
A few years ago, at the behest of some friends and relatives, I took a stab at starting an autobiography. It never got very far, mostly because I found it odd to be writing about myself. The proposed autobiography was called Wanderings.
Eventually it morphed to become Predators I Have Known (Open Road Media), a book about some of my travels. It was a good deal more fun to write about animal encounters than how a high school teacher named Solomon helped shape my future or how a water pistol my grandfather bought for me at age four suggested an eventual career choice.
All I ever wanted to do in life was travel. Restricted as I am to one small planet, I determined to see as much of it as possible. For this I largely blame Carl Barks and his creation Scrooge McDuck. When I was very young (three or four) my parents bought me subscriptions to about a dozen monthly comic books. There were no comic book stores, let alone comic conventions, and I was plainly far too young to be picking anything out of racks at newsstands (you can research these wonderful relics of ancient history, and you see them regularly in old movies). I learned to read via comic books.
Of which my favorite by far was Uncle Scrooge. Despite being old, having to use a cane, wear glasses, and having memory problems, Scrooge wandered the world in search of adventure (and profit). Even as a very young child I perceived via this comic character that anyone could see the world no matter their age. I determined that when I was old enough to do so, I would emulate Scrooge. I did not foresee that it would lead to a career as a writer, far less one focused on speculative fiction.
When I discovered science-fiction, through a couple of books my father kept, I was both enthralled (Asimov’s collection Nine Tomorrows) and intimidated (Van Vogt’s World of Null-A). I put SF aside for a while while I focused on academics and the classics, not returning to science-fiction until my senior year in high school. That was when I realized that via SF I could wander not only this one world but dozens, hundreds of others. I began to do so, starting with the classic Groff Conklin and Judith Merrell collections and moving on to individual novels. As a senior at UCLA I began to imagine new worlds of my own.
Now here I am today: still wandering, both on this world and in the hundreds of others in my mind, occasionally describing them for others to share. As much as I enjoy pointing out Bellini’s last sculpture in Rome or a particularly interesting bug in Peru’s Manu, I take pleasure in detailing a planet-wide rainforest in Midworld or one based on slime in the forthcoming Secretions. It all harkens back to Barks and Scrooge.
On the first page of Barks’ Scrooge adventure The Mines of King Solomon, a frantic Scrooge is preparing for his annual tour of his international properties. While dictating instructions to his army of subordinates, he recites a litany of utterly fascinating place names that Barks doubtless drew from his file of old National Geographic magazines. My favorite was Famagusta, which for years I thought surely must be an invented name for a made-up place. When I discovered that it was a real location, I determined one day to go there.
Famagusta is an old city on Cyprus. There aren’t a lot of tourists, it’s a fun place to wander around, and there are a couple of little cafes and one decent souvenir shop. My thanks to Barks and Scrooge for the heads-up.
I hope you get to Famagusta some day. In the interim, here are some more wanderings, to places and times and worlds that I’ve enjoyed making up for myself, and am pleased to share.