Alan Dean Foster: More Than Just A Novelizer

 
by Arisia

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There is an entire universe out there, best known by the name The Humanx Commonwealth, created by the imagination of Alan Dean Foster. It contains many interesting planets and peoples, in some of my favorite books.

Humanx is a term made by merging two species in this universe, the humans and the thranx. Humans we know. Thranx are insectoid, kind of like a big cockroach, only much nicer. Humans and Thranx more or less get along and work together. The species which is the “enemy” is the A-Ann. I picture them as tall upright ants. They are very cold-hearted, but intelligent.

There are dozens of books written in the setting of the Humanx Commonwealth, several stand-alones, and a few series. The most popular is the Pip and Flinx series, which contains fourteen books as of next month.

My favorite Foster novel is Midworld, one of the stand-alone stories in the Humanx Commonwealth universe, although there is a second novel, Mid-Flinx, which takes place on the planet of Midworld when Pip and Flinx visit it. You would think that a book that combines two of my favorites would be wonderful, but it was disappointing. I guess Foster has his bad days like the rest of us.

Midworld would make a perfect game. It’s mostly an obstacle course. The planet is covered with a very dense rain forest, so dense that no light gets down to the surface, so only things like yeasts or phosphorescent water critters live there. The inhabitants live in the middle level, where they build houses in the branches and tunnel out the trees. When a couple of humans crash-land into the trees, they have to try to get back to their base, but they keep running into the oddest creatures and plants, and without the help of the locals, they would have been dead many times. The local inhabitants are always in pairs. The human has a partner, which is a green furry animal like a small elephant. The partnership is reminiscent of the Pern human-dragon partnership, but the green animals are much less intelligent than a Pern dragon. This world has a secret, which is every bit as fascinating as Dune’s secret. I highly recommend Midworld.

The Pip and Flinx series begins with For Love of Mother-Not, which by a strange coincidence is sitting in a dark corner behind Door #3, here in the Friday Challenge. Not only that, but it is apparently a prequel, written fourth in the series. Maybe this is the exception that proves the rule, but I consider it the best of the series.

Flinx comes on the scene as a small boy being sold in the slave market on a planet called Moth. His name is Phillip Lynx. The Lynx name denotes him to be the child of a particular kind of prostitute. He knows very little about his background, like who his parents are, and this provides him with a goal throughout the series. He searches for his mother and father and finds bits of information as the series progresses. He learns that he has an intermittent and uncontrollable power to read the emotions of other people, and to change their emotions and intentions. He is bought by Mother Mastiff, an old woman who operates a shop in a slum area and runs various scams on her customers. Flinx learns her trade and provides protection.

Pip is an Alaspinian miniature dragon – minidrag – found in an alley by Flinx, who brings her home as a pet. (Oops, we don’t find out Pip is a she until several books later.) She looks like a snake with wings, and she rides on Flinx’s shoulder, coiled around his neck inside his shirt. She pokes her head out if she becomes alarmed, which makes people back off quickly, because threatened Alaspinian minidrags spit a highly corrosive, violently neurotoxic venom, which will kill a human in less than a minute if it enters the blood stream, and they normally aim at the eyes. She and Flinx have an empathic relationship, which is comical at times and very efficient against enemies.

Flinx is being hunted by various groups, and he doesn’t know who any of them are or what they want. In For Love of Mother-Not, some of them find him and attempt to kidnap him, but they end up with Mother Mastiff. Flinx follows them all over the planet and rescues her, and in the process finds some hints about his origin and the people that are looking for him. He decides to pursue these bits of information. That takes him to other planets and puts him in the middle of many strange adventures. In the other books, of course.

Foster has a prolific imagination, which makes his books very enjoyable. There are four-dimensional beings that look like bears, don’t talk, communicate entirely by telepathy, and are very intelligent and advanced in science. Then there’s a very odd-looking creature Flinx finds in a circus; he is sort of pear-shaped, and although he talks, nobody knows what he is talking about. He just spews out strings of syllables that make up words, but they don’t go together. He turns out to be something very unexpected.

In my opinion, you would be missing many good books if you ignore Foster’s works that are not movie novelizations. I hope I have stirred your interest without giving away too much of the stories.

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Arisia blogs at four-way mind meld. Little else is known about her.