If You Shoot the Breeze, are You Murdering the Weather?

by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster has well-informed opinions about, well, almost everything. A decade ago, he started sharing some of them in 5enses Magazine . This volume collects the first hundred of his essays, talking about (this is a very abbreviated list): unperformed symphonies, San Diego Comic Con, Kusari-doi (aka Japanese rainchains), electric and self-driving cars and airplanes, coywolves, Felix the cheetah, robots (humanoid and non-), hurricanes, chocolate, virtual reality, Orson Welles, Yayoi Kusama, Burj Khalifa, Jimmy Durante, Disney, The Beatles, Warner Brothers cartoons, food science, the Rothschilds, Mark Twain, giant balloon dogs, Sagalassos, Botticelli's Primavera , washing machines, Courbet's Le Sommeil , medical office wall art, the Louvre, Tuvalu and Fiji, and the uncanny valley.
Foster 120 published books span a variety of genres, from science fiction and fantasy, to horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. His film novelizations (including Star Wars , Star Trek , Alien , Terminator , and Transformers ) have garnered him the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. He also writes music, power lifts competitively, and explores as much of the world as he can. He has lived in Tahiti, camped in French Polynesia, traveled extensively in Europe and throughout Asia and the Pacific, in addition to exploring the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. He has camped in the Peruvian jungle, and ridden forty-foot whale sharks in the waters off Western Australia, white-water rafted the Zambezi River, driven (solo) the length and breadth of Namibia, crossed the Andes by car, gone swimming with giant otters in Brazil, and surveyed Papua New Guinea both above and below the water.

270 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2022

About the author

Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California. He received a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. in 1969. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. This interest is carried over to his writing, but with a twist: the new places encountered in his books are likely to be on another planet, and the people may belong to an alien race.

Foster began his career as an author when a letter he sent to Arkham Collection was purchased by the editor and published in the magazine in 1968. His first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, a galactic alliance between humans and an insectlike race called Thranx. Several other novels, including the Icerigger trilogy, are also set in the world of the Commonwealth. The Tar-Aiym Krang also marked the first appearance of Flinx, a young man with paranormal abilities, who reappears in other books, including Orphan Star, For Love of Mother-Not, and Flinx in Flux.

Foster has also written The Damned series and the Spellsinger series, which includes The Hour of the Gate, The Moment of the Magician, The Paths of the Perambulator, and Son of Spellsinger, among others. Other books include novelizations of science fiction movies and television shows such as Star Trek, The Black Hole, Starman, Star Wars, and the Alien movies. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a bestselling novel based on the Star Wars movies, received the Galaxy Award in 1979. The book Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. His novel Our Lady of the Machine won him the UPC Award (Spain) in 1993. He also won the Ignotus Award (Spain) in 1994 and the Stannik Award (Russia) in 2000.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of the first one hundred short essays that Foster wrote monthly for a local newspaper/magazine focusing on art and science. (Actually, I gave the Table of Contents a quick count and only came up with ninety-eight titles, but I may have missed a couple of things.) The essays are less than a thousand words each and I found them to be an almost perfect length to fill the duration of commercial breaks in hockey and baseball games. (CBJ & Go Yankees.) The topics are very wide-ranging and almost always interesting. He comes off as a cranky old guy grumbling about modern developments in many of them, which I loved, since I'm a cranky old guy who grumbles about modern changes all of the time. For example: refrigerators that have computers and stereos and screens built into them instead of just keeping your food cold are silly, having to buy mayonnaise in plastic squeeze bottles instead of glass jars is annoying because you waste a significant portion of the content, stores stock holiday merchandise way too early, parades are annoying when they broadcast ads and individual lip-synching performers instead of letting you see the floats and marching bands, television stations cover up a quarter or more of the screen with ads and crap instead of letting you see the whole program, electric juicers are silly, and so on. (And stay off of my lawn, okay?) His writing is breezy and amusing, and there are plenty of what might be called "Dad jokes" peppered throughout the text. (I mean, note the title!) He expresses a lot of opinions with which I mostly agreed, such as the (non-PC) observation on page 123 that Anne Francis was pretty darn attractive in Forbidden Planet, or on page 210 that your doctor should already have a good idea about your medical history and condition, and perhaps especially that people who refuse to wear face masks or get themselves or their children vaccinated in the midst of a pandemic are idiots. I learned a new word: affineur, good for Green Bay. The best thing about the book is his enthusiasm and optimism for art and scientific advancement and education through travel, everything from classical music to battery-powered planes to the ability to view and appreciate great works of art via high-definition television. It's an educational, uplifting, feel-good read.