All right, I admit it: I'm a big fan of Star Trek! :) Reading this novelization based on the movie made the sci-fi nerd in me very happy. I would highly recommend this book to any Star Trek fan who laughs at the one-liners and can't wait until the next movie comes out to relive the adventures of ...
I had started listening to this book a while back and was interested enough in it to check it out again when it came available. I got to about 90% completion and my check out expired again. After reading some reviews and discovering that there is no climax or real ending to this book I just let ...
3.5 stars really. This installment is not quite as pulse quickening as the previous books in the series, but rather a slow crescendo. What at first seems more of a romance story than anything having to do with the awesome world building we are accustomed to in the Humanx-Commonwealth universe, t...
After a disastrous kidnapping attempt leaves him with an enticing tidbit of information, Flinx decides to leave Moth in search of his elusive heritage. The one man who does know, however, is convinced Flinx is after him for revenge, so getting close proves to be more of a chore than Flinx hoped i...
Flinx starts out to find a weapon to use against the hungry evil accelerating toward the galaxy, only to be diverted to a planet, on which landings are forbidden because of the low technological level of its inhabitants. Flinx has to land so his ship can make repairs. There he meets a backwater r...
(from my blog http://randoymwords.blogspot.com/)This was a fluffy thing about a modern Flash Gordon type who gets kidnapped into space along with a random dog. Now, I've read a lot of Alan Dean Foster, but most of those books have been movie or TV adaptations. It's something that he's very good a...
‘Dirge’, the third book (chronologically by story events, if not publication order) of Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series, pulls back from the personal level of the first two books and opens the saga up to a truly cosmic scale. If the previous books were ‘Close Encounters of the Third ...
Novelizations of movies are always precarious reads, especially in this case where the novel was written after a script that was created from a long lineage of novels. In the case of The Thing we're stuck with a book that is based on the original script for the film, not the shooting script. Fans...
An invasion of the insects30 January 2013tThis is a continuation, and the conclusion, to the story that began in Spellsinger. The party of adventurers (which is what they are) have reached the main mammal city to warn the council of the invasion of a race of insects called the Plated Folk. Appare...
The idea of the book was very clever, and the first half of the book was a lot of fun. About halfway through the book, that changed, and the second half was a total hash.Maxwell Parker was a successful tabloid writer. He covered the science beat, which meant he did articles about goofy science tr...
It's been a long time since I first read this book. And it was fun to read it again. The narrated versions of the books are very well done. In this book, which has Flinx on Alaspin returning Pips babies to the wild, Flinx finds himself wrapped up in an adventure related to a beautiful young woman...
I read and enjoyed Alan Dean Foster’s stories of Flinx and Pip when I was a teen/college student. This was the mid-80’s and there were a half dozen books or so. They’ve recently been re-released (and apparently several more books have been written). My younger son, the voracious SF-Fantasy reader...
I can’t believe the rubbish job Del Rey (Ballantine) has done on the current reprints of the well beloved Pip & Flinx novels. Gone are the magnificent covers illustrated by the likes of Michael Whelan and Bob Eggleton. Replaced by blurry monochromatic photos of... what's this? A Justin Bieber cl...
How many times can something that is dead kill?This story was written by Alan Dean Foster about the ancient Greek myth of Perseus. The book begins with Perseus' mother being executed by sea, Perseus' grandfather put him and his mother into a coffin and nailed them in, then he and a group of sold...
Successful Chicago commodities broker abducted by aliens Not a headline from the National Enquirer, just Marcus Walker’s own little Jerry Springer moment. He was indeed hustled aboard an alien Vilenjji starship, part of a cargo of primitive creatures bound for the “civilized” part of the galaxy,...
Sliding Scales is the third to the last book in the Pip & Flinx SF adventure series and it shows. Foster, the author is obviously getting tired of Flinx as a protagonist, because in this book he makes his star character almost incidental to the plot. The story in broad strokes is this: Flinx d...
I reviewed two Foster books for the Fall 2007 issue of Prometheus, the quarterly newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society. The other is of his Sagramanda, a techno-thriller set in near-future India.Here is an excerpt of my review of Transformers; visit my review site Prometheus Unbound for ...
Interrupted by a variety of cultures and customs, our reluctant hero heads ever homeward. Escaped from alien slavers, three-tailed Niyyuu escort human Marcus Walker, speech-augmented mutt George, cephalopod Sque, and gigantic Tuuqalian poet Braouk. When their three ships appear over Hyff, Ussakk ...
I'm a fan of Foster and have read around 50 of his novels. This one had a few problems that are uncharacteristic for him. First, the novel has some definite pacing issues. The introduction phase seemed to take about 70 pages, which is considerable for a relatively short novel. Very little happene...
I picked up this book from the library in early August because I remembered reading it when I was eleven or twelve (around the age I was devouring the Dragonlance books as if they would disappear) and loving it to pieces. Now, over ten years later, I find myself rather...disappointed.The first th...
It's been a long time since I used to say Foster was my favorite author, and there's no doubt my tastes have changed since then. But because Midworld was one of his best and I remember liking the Pip & Flinx series too, I decided to pick up this one that combines the two - somehow I never read i...
I saw the film when I was 9 years old. It has given me nightmares well in to my 30's. This is great stuff!!!After getting past the initial shock of watching the movie at such a young age, I went and bought the Alien Story Picture book and then in my early teen years I read the novel. It is a grea...
Well, I never knew this was a book! Its only a short read, however it's still very enjoyable. The content is the same as the movie, which in turn leads me to believe the book was written from the movie script.Something I liked about this book in comparison to the movie is that you can easily see ...
This book is kind of political sci fi. The problem with it is that there is no suspense in it. Things like people getting blown up or a mega police bust are described as if they were the most mundane thing. There's no build up before the big reveal. There are some sections at the end where protag...
Through-out the course of this book I was thinking of giving it 2 stars. Till the last 20 pages are so. That so rarely happens in bookreading, that the end somehow pulls it all together? That's what we all hope for when reading a book that drags, we stick with it, and so often we are never rew...
Continuing his quest to fulfill the charge laid on him by the dying Tarin Beckwith, Etjole Ehomba now travels through more dangerous lands still: civilization. The skills that serve him so well in the wild struggle to adapt to the peculiarities of each little kingdom through which he travels. But...
Having found at last a way across the sea, Etjole Ehomba is not finding the journey any easier than before. Few things speed him on his way, and many things attempt to delay him. But the herdsman is still holding fast to his promise to the dying Tarin Beckwith: to rescue the Visioness Themaryl f...
This was a wonderfully fun read, and as soothing as a warm drink. It fits into an old-fashioned optimistic mode of thinking about human expansion among alien species, that surely we are enlightened enough to solve everyone else's problems for them. This was a book that continually brought TV Trop...
The title pretty much illustrates the type of humour in this book, puns of all sorts. I hadn't read anything else by this author so it took me a while to realise that the world in this series is a world of animals and magic can be worked through music. The magician behind the duar (guitar), howev...
My favorite from ADF. When I first read this I was in one of my Africa phases (currently in another but am reading an entirely different genre this time) and this little jewel caught my attention.ADF was an author that I'd read before and liked his work (not so blatantly pandering to the Hollywoo...
Late August 2008: I’m sitting at home alone, I haven’t spoken in hours, I’m contentedly detached from the world with cobwebs forming on my cock as I stare unblinkingly at the television, a cigarette long burnt to the filter encrusted on my lower lip, my dinner half-eaten, cold, and now being drag...
Alan Dean Foster continues to deliver the good on the Alien series with the 3rd instalment Alien 3 (not the most original title). This is a much better read and I recommend it to anyone who found the movie to be somewhat lacking. Again it has additional content that was not seen in the movie unti...
"The first landing on Shiraz was going to be dull, predictable routine, nothing more."The Quozl are a gentle species of space explorers that have come to colonize the planet they have named Shiraz. The only problem is that Shiraz is already inhabited, by a race of violent and confusing beings th...
Finished reading this book today. I was lookingfor another Alan Dean Foster novel to read becauseI really enjoy his writing style and having readthe Dammned Trilogy in the past which I reallyenjoyed I wanted to start reading another seriesof books by him.I wasn't disappointed :-)This book starte...
Not a bad book but not really up to the standards of the rest of then humanx Commonwealth. I'm not sure if I'll read the other two books. Who am I kidding... I'll get around to them eventually... Niven pulled the Ringworld back after Ringworld Children so I'll give Foster the benefit of the doubt...
This is basically 'High Noon' in outer space, but I really enjoyed both the movie and the novelization. Interesting take, translating this western tale into a futuristic setting. Lone sheriff takes a stand against corruption at the mining facility he is assigned to and the mine's boss hires mor...
The confusing part of this book is where it fits within the other Flinx Pip universe. It is a poser. But Foster wrote it second. This novel stands on its own two legs, and is a very good story. Read it even if you are not a Flinx and Pip fan.The Vom, an evil entity of immense power and ability ...
I have not read this book in over thirty years. I read it again on a nostalgic whimsy. It was a decent adaptation of the movie [although the ending of the book differs from the movie’s ending]. I know other reviewers have mentioned this, but there is a really bad typo at the very end that rui...
