Alan Dean Foster wrote several books in the Star Wars and Aliens franchise, and now that Disney owns the rights to both, it's decided to stop paying Foster royalties.
That's the short version of the dispute between Foster and Disney, which abruptly went public this week as Foster's representatives in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) try to resolve the dispute. Disney has simply gone no-contact, reportedly refusing to discuss the issue with Foster at all unless he signs a non-disclosure agreement. Foster has turned to the SFWA's Grievance Committee, a group that helps authors deal with legal and rights problems, in an effort to sort out the entire mess.
Foster is coming up on his 50th year as a working science fiction and fantasy author. While he has a few dozen original novels to his name, such as the Spellsinger series, he may be best known for his film novelizations, including Alien, Aliens, Terminator: Salvation, The Chronicles of Riddick, Dark Star, The Thing, Krull, and The Last Starfighter.
Among Star Wars fans, Foster is famous for writing 1978's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, an out-of-continuity sequel to A New Hope that's also the first Star Wars novel ever published. Splinter is decidedly out of step with later Star Wars canon, because it was written before George Lucas had put any thought into what would happen in The Empire Strikes Back, but fans still consider Foster the first author to contribute to what would become the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Foster also ghost-wrote the 1976 novelization of Star Wars, From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, and wrote the 2015 novelization of The Force Awakens under his own name.
Foster's dispute with Disney is specifically over Splinter of the Mind's Eye, as well as his novelizations of Star Wars, Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3. All five novels are still in print, and following Disney's purchases of Lucasfilm in 2012 and Fox in 2019, Disney technically took on the liabilities of each company as well as their assets. That entitles Foster to continue to receive royalties from the sales of those novels. Disney simply hasn't paid him, and won't negotiate on the subject at all until such time as Foster signs their NDA.
In an open letter to Disney, published on the SFWA's website, Foster writes, "You continue to ignore requests from my agents. You continue to ignore queries from SFWA... You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me. Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer. How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?"
Further complicating the issue, both Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, are unwell. Foster notes in his letter that Oxley has "serious medical issues," and that Foster himself was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer in 2016. It's not his major point in the letter overall, but Foster does note that he could really use the money, and it does mean that Disney is now officially withholding payments for no stated reason from a long-standing creative partner... who has cancer. It's a great look for the company.
In addition, the dispute between Foster and Disney has the potential to establish some troubling legal precedents, as SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal (The Calculating Stars) notes in her post on the subject on the SFWA website. "Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract," Kowal writes. "In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says. If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company."
Kowal and the SFWA have requested that fans of Foster, or those who "believe that a writer's work has value," should let Disney know about it. Two hashtags on social media, #DearMickey and #DisneyMustPay, are devoted to the topic.
This may sound quixotic, since Disney owns and operates much of the known universe, but a campaign like this one has been successful in the recent past. Marvel Comics author Bill Mantlo suffered a traumatic brain injury in 1992, after being struck by a hit-and-run driver, and was left unable to care for himself. Among many other credits, Mantlo was the co-creator of Rocket Raccoon. Upon the character's introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Guardians of the Galaxy, fans rallied to demand that Disney and Marvel Studios step in to help Mantlo's family. Eventually, they did so, and Mantlo now lives in a house that Marvel bought for him. It's not beyond the pale that a similar social media campaign could work for Foster.
Foster's most recent work, Madrenga, an original fantasy novel about a young boy with hidden powers on a journey to deliver a message for his queen, was released in hardcover and on Kindle on November 17th.
Source: SFWA