Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Dean Foster

Foster slips a quiet truth about the writerly dream into a joke about being born too late. On the surface, it reads like a travel-lover's humblebrag: writing pays the bills and buys the plane ticket. Underneath, its real subject is permission - the way a creative career can double as an alibi for curiosity. He isn't just saying he likes to travel; he's saying he built a life where wandering looks like work, and work looks like wandering.

Invoking Sir Richard Francis Burton sharpens the point. Burton wasn't a tourist. He was a restless, controversial, hyper-competent collector of languages and experiences: explorer, translator, imperial agent, boundary-crosser. Dropping that name signals Foster's appetite for the world as a text to be decoded, not a backdrop for leisure. It's also a sly admission of scale. Modern travel is accessible, mediated, and comparatively safe; the grand 19th-century myth of the explorer is inseparable from empire, danger, and the moral mess of "discovery". Foster wants the intensity without pretending he can ethically or practically inhabit the role.

The "wrong century" line is doing double duty: it's self-deprecating, and it's a critique of nostalgia. He's acknowledging that the romantic version of exploration belongs to an era with different power dynamics and fewer maps, and that the contemporary writer's frontier is imaginative. If Burton conquered blank spaces on paper maps, Foster colonizes the unknown through fiction - still roaming, just with different borders.