Love Quote by Alan Dean Foster

The sly flex here is that Foster uses "mistakes" as a decoy, a quick nod to the nitpicks that inevitably swarm any genre work, especially anything adjacent to effects-driven storytelling. By acknowledging the error-spotters up front, he drains them of power. The real metric of success, he argues, isnt technical perfection but reader behavior: the moment the audience stops auditing the machinery and starts interrogating the people inside it.

That shift from "special effects" to "motivations" is doing a lot of cultural work. Foster came up in an era when science fiction and tie-in fiction were often treated as spectacle or product, praised for worlds and widgets while being condescended to as emotionally thin. He reframes immersion as an ethical relationship: if readers debate why a character acted, theyre granting the character interiority, and by extension granting the author craft. You dont argue about motives unless you believe there was a mind there.

The subtext is also a quiet defense of character-first genre writing against the industrial logic of franchises. Effects can impress, but they dont invite accountability. Motive does. When readers ask "Why did she do that?" theyre not just entertained; theyre invested enough to demand coherence, to test the character like a real person. Foster is describing the point where spectacle becomes story and where story becomes attachment, the only kind of connection that survives after the fireworks fade.