Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Dean Foster

There’s a mischievous confidence in Foster’s shrug: “For fantasy, none at all.” Coming from a working pro who’s built whole ecosystems of imagined worlds, the line reads less like laziness than a quiet jab at how people misread the genre. We treat “research” as synonymous with legitimacy, as if the only serious storytelling is the kind that footnotes its way through history. Foster flips that prestige economy on its head: fantasy doesn’t borrow authority from the real world; it has to manufacture authority from scratch.

The subtext is craft-minded, not anti-intellectual. He’s separating factual verification from the deeper homework fantasy always demands: internal consistency, believable motives, ecology that doesn’t collapse under a reader’s first skeptical glance. You can’t Google the mating habits of a dragon, but you still have to make the dragon feel like it could exist long enough for a society to build myths, economies, and fear around it. That’s research by another name: synthesis, pattern recognition, and a ruthless sense of cause and effect.

Context matters, too. Foster came up during the late-20th-century boom of franchise and tie-in fiction, where writers were often treated like competent technicians rather than “serious” artists. This quip doubles as self-defense: don’t mistake the absence of archival labor for the absence of rigor. The real flex is the implication that fantasy’s burden is higher, not lower - because it can’t hide behind the alibi of “that’s how it really happened.”