Author Alan Dean Foster talks to us about his connections to some of the most important sci-fi films of all time, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien and more.

With a career spanning over five decades, dozens of novels and many more short stories, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prolific genre writers currently working. And whether he’s writing sci-fi or fantasy, novelisations of major films or personal storytelling, Foster’s work has always had a touch of the cinematic about it.

In one of his earliest published stories, a 1971 short called Why Johnny Can’t Speed, Foster imagines a near future in which drivers rumble onto freeways with guns strapped to their vehicles. Published two years before Jg Ballard’s own auto-fetish dystopia, Crash (1973), or in cinema, the petrol-crazed nightmares of Death Race 2000 (1975) or Mad Max (1979), its descriptions of mayhem on America’s roads have...