Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Dean Foster

A polite-sounding lament that’s really an indictment: Foster is naming the quiet violence of scale. “Overwhelming triumph” frames corporate consolidation not as a neutral market outcome but as a conquest, one that wins by flattening. The phrase “international multimedia conglomerate” is deliberately clunky, almost bureaucratic, because the enemy here isn’t a single villain with a face; it’s an ecosystem that turns stories into “content” portfolios, optimized for synergy, franchising, and risk management. In that world, diversity doesn’t disappear because anyone hates it; it evaporates because accounting hates uncertainty.

The subtext is about power shifting away from writers as originators toward companies as owners of pipelines. When a handful of giants control publishing imprints, distribution channels, adaptation studios, and marketing megaphones, they can dictate terms: lower advances, tighter contracts, rights grabs, work-for-hire arrangements, algorithm-friendly sameness. “Less diversity within the field” isn’t only about identity or genre variety, but about the narrowing of what gets funded, promoted, and allowed to fail.

Foster’s second clause is the sharper blade. It’s not just that breaking in is harder; “make any kind of a living” points to a profession hollowed out into a prestige hobby. The complaint lands in a specific cultural moment where blockbuster IP, streaming-era churn, and platform economics reward existing brands and recognizable “universes,” while midlist careers - the traditional ladder for developing writers - are squeezed. The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s labor politics in literary clothing: a warning that a culture run by conglomerates may still produce stories, but it will struggle to produce writers.