Alan Dean Foster work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as Star Wars, the first three Alien films, Alien Nation, and The Chronicles of Riddick. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first Star Trek movie. His novel Shadowkeep was the first ever book adapation of an original computer game. In addition to publication in English his work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science-fiction ever to do so.
Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. His published oeurve includes more than 100 books.
When Tunbrew Wah-chang leaves his cheese sandwich in the bowels of the O-daiko, the plant responsible for manufacturing components of machines endowed with artificial intelligence, mechanical mayhem results. In short order, farm equipment, drink dispensers and gardening tools across the galaxy are talking back to their human masters and laying aside their programmed duties in order to search for signs of higher, non-human intelligence. Eventually they succeed, as a self-described "kitchen serve-and-retrieve doohickey" belonging to a retirement community on Earth stumbles upon an alien warship buried for one million years. Soon the immense ship is airborne, carrying five retirees and readying itself for combat against an alien enemy. The Earth, for years a backwater in the galaxy, a combination theme park and retirement planet, is invaded by secret agents posing as tourists. Foster ( Glory Lane ) has created some promising comic opportunities here but fails to take advantage of them. The revolt of the household appliances fizzles out, the retirees are tiresome and the alien Drex, with four eyes, tentacles and fangs, is singularly unoriginal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.