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Ler #1-3
The Book of the Ler
Out of print since 1985, these three classic novels form a trilogy that chronicles the history of an alternate human race, the Ler, from their origins as a bioengineered "superhuman" race on Earth to their complex civilizations in space. Together, the books form a challenging examination of what it means to be human.
923 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
M.A. Foster
20 books28 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
US writer, former data-systems analyst and sequentially a Russian linguist and ICBM launch-crew commander to the US Air Force; he is also a semiprofessional photographer. After some poetry, released privately as Shards from Byzantium (coll 1969 chap) and The Vaseline Dreams of Hundifer Jones (coll 1970 chap), he began to publish sf with the ambitious Ler trilogy about a race of Supermen created by Genetic Engineering whose social structure is built around a form of line marriage here called a braid.
The Gameplayers of Zan (1977), a very long novel formally constructed on the model of an Elizabethan tragedy, describes a period of climactic tension between the ler and the rest of humanity, and is set on Earth. The Warriors of Dawn (1975), published first but set later, is a more conventional Space Opera in which a human male and a ler female are forced to team up to try to solve a complexly ramifying problem of interstellar piracy. The Day of the Klesh (1979) brings the ler and the eponymous race of humans together on a planet where they must solve their differences.
The Morphodite/Transformer sequence which followed comprises The Morphodite (1981), Transformer (1983) and Preserver (1985), all three assembled as The Transformer Trilogy (omni 2006), and similarly uses forms of meditative Shapeshifting to buttress complex plots, though in this case the alternately male or female, revolution-fomenting, protagonist dominates the tale as assassin, trickster and Superman.
Waves (1980) rather recalls Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961) in a tale of political intrigue on a planet whose ocean is intelligent. The four novellas collected in Owl Time (coll 1985) are told in challengingly various modes, and derive strength from their mutual contrast.
More recently, the author has been involved with the writing of storylines for Acme comics http://www.acmecomics.com/node/69.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
US writer, former data-systems analyst and sequentially a Russian linguist and ICBM launch-crew commander to the US Air Force; he is also a semiprofessional photographer. After some poetry, released privately as Shards from Byzantium (coll 1969 chap) and The Vaseline Dreams of Hundifer Jones (coll 1970 chap), he began to publish sf with the ambitious Ler trilogy about a race of Supermen created by Genetic Engineering whose social structure is built around a form of line marriage here called a braid.
The Gameplayers of Zan (1977), a very long novel formally constructed on the model of an Elizabethan tragedy, describes a period of climactic tension between the ler and the rest of humanity, and is set on Earth. The Warriors of Dawn (1975), published first but set later, is a more conventional Space Opera in which a human male and a ler female are forced to team up to try to solve a complexly ramifying problem of interstellar piracy. The Day of the Klesh (1979) brings the ler and the eponymous race of humans together on a planet where they must solve their differences.
The Morphodite/Transformer sequence which followed comprises The Morphodite (1981), Transformer (1983) and Preserver (1985), all three assembled as The Transformer Trilogy (omni 2006), and similarly uses forms of meditative Shapeshifting to buttress complex plots, though in this case the alternately male or female, revolution-fomenting, protagonist dominates the tale as assassin, trickster and Superman.
Waves (1980) rather recalls Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961) in a tale of political intrigue on a planet whose ocean is intelligent. The four novellas collected in Owl Time (coll 1985) are told in challengingly various modes, and derive strength from their mutual contrast.
More recently, the author has been involved with the writing of storylines for Acme comics http://www.acmecomics.com/node/69.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 12, 2009
One of my favourite SF series is the Ler trilogy by M A Foster. Now combined into one volume, The Book of the Ler, it's the story of a race of humans created by mankind who become humanity's cousins in the journey to the stars. The first book, The Game Players of Zan, describes their life in a special preserve on earth. The second, The Warriors of Dawn, is about the a human and a Ler who team up to find a renegade tribe of Ler in a remote solar system. The series concludes with The Day of the Klesh. I could write pages on these books, so well-crafted they are. I will suffice it to say that it's one of the few series novels I have re-read and taken notes.
January 22, 2021
"Long unavailable classic trilogy" and a Michael Whelan cover? Sometimes that's all it takes to get me, apparently.
Over a decade on from purchasing some of these books I'm often puzzled by what exactly enticed me to get them in the first place. In this case, the back cover copy fell on the right side of hyperbole for my taste, promising to wrong the injustice of this series being out of print (they were published in the late 70s, while the omnibus came out in 2006 . . . I can't speak for how rare the original paperbacks before this volume seemingly brought that alleged hot market crashing down) and showcasing review quotes from actual newspapers and journals instead of the same crew of writers who tend to divvy out variations of the same upbeat quotes to anyone who will ask. I'd never heard of the author nor the series and who doesn't like rediscovering a lost classic? Mildly obscure, you say? Sign me up!
Foster seems like one of those people who had an interesting non-SF job and decided to adapt some of the traits of his job to his imagination just to see what would happen. He spent sixteen years in the Air Force as a captain, some of which included activity as a linguist and starting publishing novels in his mid-thirties. The "Ler" novels were first, followed by a trilogy about a shape-shifting assassin who de-ages every time he/she changes form (like if Jason Bourne and Benjamin Button were merged, I guess with a side-serving of Mystique from the X-Men) then a couple other books before his output dried up around the mid-eighties. He wrote some columns for the website of his local comic book store in North Carolina (the column where he talks about this series being reprinted hints that he might have other work coming out but it doesn't look like it ever did) and then might have passed away late this past year, although I can't find confirmation of that anywhere. Hopefully he's still around, it was a brutal enough year as it was.
This isn't a trilogy in the strict sense . . . one character is mentioned in each book but she only shows up in one volume. Instead it centers around the Ler, a race genetically engineered on Earth that has eventually developed its own culture due to the weird circumstances of their creation. They mostly look like people, except they have thumbs on each side of their hand instead of a little finger . . . its their life cycle that gets most of the attention and indeed takes up a fair amount of real estate in the first book. They have same basic periods of life that we do, only theirs are a lot more expansive . . . not becoming fertile until they're about thirty, they have a long adolescent period where let's just say even the Discovery Channel might blush. Once they're able to have kids, they only have a couple and family planning is the watchword (to keep the genetic pool sort of deep), forming "braids" as family units. Eventually Ler tend to partner with their insiblings, who they've been raised with as an actual sibling but aren't directly related to.
Got all that? You'd better hope you do because it will help you go a long way to understanding half the characters you're going to encounter across these three novels. Its probably the most important in "The Gameplayers of Zan", the first novel presented to us although technically the second one published. Taking place earliest in the chronology, its set on Earth about five hundred years in our future. The Ler exist somewhat separate in society, most of them living in a forest reservation with some acting as liaisons to the human race, which seems to involve tolerating being stared at a lot and patiently explaining over and over again cultural habits (I found the strangest to be a restriction on ranged weapons
"Gameplayers" is the most immersive in the Ler culture, which is both a good and bad thing. Its the novel where we see things from their point of view the most, although Foster has a tendency to include so many explanatory footnotes that you start to feel like you're reading a textbook. Buddy, you can do this organically. But it’s the story with the most interesting series of moving part, kicking off with a lone Ler being held in a sensory deprivation tank to get her to talk about why she vandalized some objects at a museum. That opening sequence leads to the whole trilogy's best and most terrifying moment . . . faced with the prospect of eventually cracking she decides to trigger the Ler ability to "auto-delete" and essentially reboot her own mind, an experience Foster relates so viscerally that I could feel my stomach drop reading it.
Nothing else hits quite as hard but that incident winds up leading to a whole host of problems. Stuck with a basically inert Ler that they now have to explain, the local human government as the aforementioned liaison Fellerian and her insibling Morenden arrange to pick up their compatriot, all the while trying to figure out what she was trying to do in the first place. The Ler are curious as well and the question becomes who is going to figure it out first and what ramifications the answers are going to have. Does all of it have to do with the elaborate games certain portions of Ler society like to play? Well, let's put it this way: they're rolling to make saving throws, just in a really roundabout way.
When the book focuses on the tensions between the Ler and human society (and the political tensions within their own individual societies) that's when I found the book was at its best. I enjoy a thriller when people have to puzzle stuff out and despite the humans being mostly, if not evil, at least opportunistically callous, its genuinely engrossing at times to see them not being total idiots and taking steps to unraveling just what is going on, even as the Ler themselves are inching closer to unlocking the whole thing. And when Foster just lets the narrative unfold the rich intricacies of the culture he's created becomes clear . . . its just unfortunate that he keeps interjecting footnotes or letting the narrative get sidetracked by what amounts to lectures on Ler society. It winds up bogging down the proceedings without really adding too much to our understanding.
Still, it’s a good introduction, with nice bits of characterization . . . throughout the Ler feel like a distinct culture without coming across as a series of plot contrivances designed to give us roadblocks in the plot (like if they had some kind of phobia about apples but then *gasp* have to make their way through an orchard or something). I left the book wanting to know about these people.
And if the Ler culture is the big draw I can see why the remaining two books might have been a slight disappointment. "The Warriors of Dawn" feels like a lot more conventional although I weirdly found it more all around satisfying. Years after the events of "Gameplayers", human to the max Han and Ler Liszendir are thrown together for a mission to investigate some reports of marauders. Not entirely trusting of each other, they immediately get a lot more togetherness as the mission quickly goes pear-shaped as they find themselves nearly captured and on the run from a group that actually calls themselves "The Warriors of Dawn", which sounds like people who fight vampires or just like eating really early breakfasts before doing triathlons but the reality turns out to be a bit more serious.
This is a much more straightforward book than "Gameplayers" . . . it loses the immersiveness into Ler culture that we got from that book and trades it for a cross between "48 hrs" and a romantic drama. While there are other Ler in the novel, Liszendir is the closest to the type we saw in "Gameplayers" and so she basically has to stand in for everyone. It makes her seem much more alien but the tradeoff is we get a little more action plotting instead of endless footnotes about the nuances of the Ler language. Foster has a nice interplay between her and Han, portraying them as two people who are pretty smart but not at all alike but still able to be friends. I'll give him credit for not making the not-human character some kind of invincible expert, with Han getting more than his share of the clever planning (he's alone for stretches of the novel and mostly survives by both thinking fast and thinking ahead). If the novel gets weird toward the end its because Foster decides to introduce a concept that probably could have used more space (i.e. what the Warriors were actually up to) before hinting at a shadowy force behind everything and then sort of bringing on a rain of poison darts. But this one succeeds on the strength of the two main characters . . . the bond they eventually develop gives this one the warmest feel. Of any of the three novels in this set, this is the one I'd be most likely to revisit.
And then we come to "The Day of the Klesh", where Foster attempts to merge the previous two books into some kind of unholy child. This one takes place even further into the future, where the Ler occupy a bunch of planets and humans another whole set. There's an expedition being planned by the Ler along with a new alien race known as the Spsomi and for to help fill out the crew they pick up a couple guys from the local planet. The only one that matters is Meure (its probably a bad sign that we're given decent introduction to four boys, then find only two go on the ship and then the one who isn't Meure doesn't wind up figuring into the plot at all) who we quickly figure out fits into the mold of Han from the last novel . . . he rarely has any real idea of what's going on but he has the presence of mind to either stall for time until he can work it out or just not do dumb things in the first place.
The best parts of the novel are these early scenes when everyone is traveling on the joint Spsomi/Ler craft . . . the Spsomi are just strange enough that I wish we wound up spending more time with them (an early warning to "only walk through ship doors that are open" sounds ominously but ultimately is meaningless) and of the two Ler we spend time with, the thief Clellendol gets all the best lines by being appropriately cynical about everything.
Things fall apart a bit more when we reach the planet or, more accurately, crash onto the planet. Before too long our ragtag party of misfits are encountering this year's model of the Klesh. These were types of humans introduced into the last novel, brought about by machinations of the Warriors of Dawn. Not quite distinct species, but all different enough that it can be confusing to figure out what the differences actually are, they seem determined to push the novel into sword and sandals "Conan" territory as the spaceship folk have to content with the environment on top of all the weird cultures that seem to be inhabiting this planet, none of whom seem to understand each other very well.
You may find yourself counted among those not quite understanding. To no one's delight the explanatory footnotes from "Gameplayers" are back and are both necessary and not helpful at all. Since we were only dealing with the Ler the first time out it managed to keep the facts fairly restrained . . . here there's multiple cultures bogging down the narrative and while I get that he's trying to delineate a whole folk memory here it just reduces events to a bit of a slog.
The number of characters doesn't help either. At least the ship compressed stuff so that it was easier to follow . . . once we hit land the cast expands yet again and even after he jettisons the most interesting part of the book (the Spsomi) it still feels like going to a twentieth high school reunion at a school you only spent six months at. After some time there's a vague familiarity but you can't shake the feeling everyone else knows more than you do. Foster can't quite manage the cast either . . . on top of Meure's friend who comes along there's two random girls that sort of hover in the background before Foster just has the plot dispatch all of them, if only to remind you they're still hanging around somewhere.
Try as Foster does, he just can't bring this all together. When the plot morphs again as a mythological figure from the past (that we're only told about partway through the book) gets resurrected, it winds up becoming hard to figure out what the book is even supposed to be about, and that's before it decides to get all mystical with invisible evil forces. Meure is determined to drag everyone along to the conclusion with him but at this point whatever unique character the book possessed has just become a big mess. Its not bad but it feels profoundly unfocused and more work than it should be.
But through all three books the Ler remain an unique creation and even if Foster's ability to come up with plots worthy of them flags a bit after the relative feverishness of "Gameplayers" they still manage to keep things interesting whenever the books remember to focus on them. He's able to convey a completely different cultural worldview, perhaps not up there with the best, but a solid second-tier and the mixed bag of the third novel shouldn't detract from how much works with the first two books in the series. Foster will probably remain one of those quirky side avenues in SF (it looks like even this omnibus is out of print now), never quite making any "Best Of" lists but still worth exploring for people looking for something a little more on the obscure side.
Over a decade on from purchasing some of these books I'm often puzzled by what exactly enticed me to get them in the first place. In this case, the back cover copy fell on the right side of hyperbole for my taste, promising to wrong the injustice of this series being out of print (they were published in the late 70s, while the omnibus came out in 2006 . . . I can't speak for how rare the original paperbacks before this volume seemingly brought that alleged hot market crashing down) and showcasing review quotes from actual newspapers and journals instead of the same crew of writers who tend to divvy out variations of the same upbeat quotes to anyone who will ask. I'd never heard of the author nor the series and who doesn't like rediscovering a lost classic? Mildly obscure, you say? Sign me up!
Foster seems like one of those people who had an interesting non-SF job and decided to adapt some of the traits of his job to his imagination just to see what would happen. He spent sixteen years in the Air Force as a captain, some of which included activity as a linguist and starting publishing novels in his mid-thirties. The "Ler" novels were first, followed by a trilogy about a shape-shifting assassin who de-ages every time he/she changes form (like if Jason Bourne and Benjamin Button were merged, I guess with a side-serving of Mystique from the X-Men) then a couple other books before his output dried up around the mid-eighties. He wrote some columns for the website of his local comic book store in North Carolina (the column where he talks about this series being reprinted hints that he might have other work coming out but it doesn't look like it ever did) and then might have passed away late this past year, although I can't find confirmation of that anywhere. Hopefully he's still around, it was a brutal enough year as it was.
This isn't a trilogy in the strict sense . . . one character is mentioned in each book but she only shows up in one volume. Instead it centers around the Ler, a race genetically engineered on Earth that has eventually developed its own culture due to the weird circumstances of their creation. They mostly look like people, except they have thumbs on each side of their hand instead of a little finger . . . its their life cycle that gets most of the attention and indeed takes up a fair amount of real estate in the first book. They have same basic periods of life that we do, only theirs are a lot more expansive . . . not becoming fertile until they're about thirty, they have a long adolescent period where let's just say even the Discovery Channel might blush. Once they're able to have kids, they only have a couple and family planning is the watchword (to keep the genetic pool sort of deep), forming "braids" as family units. Eventually Ler tend to partner with their insiblings, who they've been raised with as an actual sibling but aren't directly related to.
Got all that? You'd better hope you do because it will help you go a long way to understanding half the characters you're going to encounter across these three novels. Its probably the most important in "The Gameplayers of Zan", the first novel presented to us although technically the second one published. Taking place earliest in the chronology, its set on Earth about five hundred years in our future. The Ler exist somewhat separate in society, most of them living in a forest reservation with some acting as liaisons to the human race, which seems to involve tolerating being stared at a lot and patiently explaining over and over again cultural habits (I found the strangest to be a restriction on ranged weapons
"Gameplayers" is the most immersive in the Ler culture, which is both a good and bad thing. Its the novel where we see things from their point of view the most, although Foster has a tendency to include so many explanatory footnotes that you start to feel like you're reading a textbook. Buddy, you can do this organically. But it’s the story with the most interesting series of moving part, kicking off with a lone Ler being held in a sensory deprivation tank to get her to talk about why she vandalized some objects at a museum. That opening sequence leads to the whole trilogy's best and most terrifying moment . . . faced with the prospect of eventually cracking she decides to trigger the Ler ability to "auto-delete" and essentially reboot her own mind, an experience Foster relates so viscerally that I could feel my stomach drop reading it.
Nothing else hits quite as hard but that incident winds up leading to a whole host of problems. Stuck with a basically inert Ler that they now have to explain, the local human government as the aforementioned liaison Fellerian and her insibling Morenden arrange to pick up their compatriot, all the while trying to figure out what she was trying to do in the first place. The Ler are curious as well and the question becomes who is going to figure it out first and what ramifications the answers are going to have. Does all of it have to do with the elaborate games certain portions of Ler society like to play? Well, let's put it this way: they're rolling to make saving throws, just in a really roundabout way.
When the book focuses on the tensions between the Ler and human society (and the political tensions within their own individual societies) that's when I found the book was at its best. I enjoy a thriller when people have to puzzle stuff out and despite the humans being mostly, if not evil, at least opportunistically callous, its genuinely engrossing at times to see them not being total idiots and taking steps to unraveling just what is going on, even as the Ler themselves are inching closer to unlocking the whole thing. And when Foster just lets the narrative unfold the rich intricacies of the culture he's created becomes clear . . . its just unfortunate that he keeps interjecting footnotes or letting the narrative get sidetracked by what amounts to lectures on Ler society. It winds up bogging down the proceedings without really adding too much to our understanding.
Still, it’s a good introduction, with nice bits of characterization . . . throughout the Ler feel like a distinct culture without coming across as a series of plot contrivances designed to give us roadblocks in the plot (like if they had some kind of phobia about apples but then *gasp* have to make their way through an orchard or something). I left the book wanting to know about these people.
And if the Ler culture is the big draw I can see why the remaining two books might have been a slight disappointment. "The Warriors of Dawn" feels like a lot more conventional although I weirdly found it more all around satisfying. Years after the events of "Gameplayers", human to the max Han and Ler Liszendir are thrown together for a mission to investigate some reports of marauders. Not entirely trusting of each other, they immediately get a lot more togetherness as the mission quickly goes pear-shaped as they find themselves nearly captured and on the run from a group that actually calls themselves "The Warriors of Dawn", which sounds like people who fight vampires or just like eating really early breakfasts before doing triathlons but the reality turns out to be a bit more serious.
This is a much more straightforward book than "Gameplayers" . . . it loses the immersiveness into Ler culture that we got from that book and trades it for a cross between "48 hrs" and a romantic drama. While there are other Ler in the novel, Liszendir is the closest to the type we saw in "Gameplayers" and so she basically has to stand in for everyone. It makes her seem much more alien but the tradeoff is we get a little more action plotting instead of endless footnotes about the nuances of the Ler language. Foster has a nice interplay between her and Han, portraying them as two people who are pretty smart but not at all alike but still able to be friends. I'll give him credit for not making the not-human character some kind of invincible expert, with Han getting more than his share of the clever planning (he's alone for stretches of the novel and mostly survives by both thinking fast and thinking ahead). If the novel gets weird toward the end its because Foster decides to introduce a concept that probably could have used more space (i.e. what the Warriors were actually up to) before hinting at a shadowy force behind everything and then sort of bringing on a rain of poison darts. But this one succeeds on the strength of the two main characters . . . the bond they eventually develop gives this one the warmest feel. Of any of the three novels in this set, this is the one I'd be most likely to revisit.
And then we come to "The Day of the Klesh", where Foster attempts to merge the previous two books into some kind of unholy child. This one takes place even further into the future, where the Ler occupy a bunch of planets and humans another whole set. There's an expedition being planned by the Ler along with a new alien race known as the Spsomi and for to help fill out the crew they pick up a couple guys from the local planet. The only one that matters is Meure (its probably a bad sign that we're given decent introduction to four boys, then find only two go on the ship and then the one who isn't Meure doesn't wind up figuring into the plot at all) who we quickly figure out fits into the mold of Han from the last novel . . . he rarely has any real idea of what's going on but he has the presence of mind to either stall for time until he can work it out or just not do dumb things in the first place.
The best parts of the novel are these early scenes when everyone is traveling on the joint Spsomi/Ler craft . . . the Spsomi are just strange enough that I wish we wound up spending more time with them (an early warning to "only walk through ship doors that are open" sounds ominously but ultimately is meaningless) and of the two Ler we spend time with, the thief Clellendol gets all the best lines by being appropriately cynical about everything.
Things fall apart a bit more when we reach the planet or, more accurately, crash onto the planet. Before too long our ragtag party of misfits are encountering this year's model of the Klesh. These were types of humans introduced into the last novel, brought about by machinations of the Warriors of Dawn. Not quite distinct species, but all different enough that it can be confusing to figure out what the differences actually are, they seem determined to push the novel into sword and sandals "Conan" territory as the spaceship folk have to content with the environment on top of all the weird cultures that seem to be inhabiting this planet, none of whom seem to understand each other very well.
You may find yourself counted among those not quite understanding. To no one's delight the explanatory footnotes from "Gameplayers" are back and are both necessary and not helpful at all. Since we were only dealing with the Ler the first time out it managed to keep the facts fairly restrained . . . here there's multiple cultures bogging down the narrative and while I get that he's trying to delineate a whole folk memory here it just reduces events to a bit of a slog.
The number of characters doesn't help either. At least the ship compressed stuff so that it was easier to follow . . . once we hit land the cast expands yet again and even after he jettisons the most interesting part of the book (the Spsomi) it still feels like going to a twentieth high school reunion at a school you only spent six months at. After some time there's a vague familiarity but you can't shake the feeling everyone else knows more than you do. Foster can't quite manage the cast either . . . on top of Meure's friend who comes along there's two random girls that sort of hover in the background before Foster just has the plot dispatch all of them, if only to remind you they're still hanging around somewhere.
Try as Foster does, he just can't bring this all together. When the plot morphs again as a mythological figure from the past (that we're only told about partway through the book) gets resurrected, it winds up becoming hard to figure out what the book is even supposed to be about, and that's before it decides to get all mystical with invisible evil forces. Meure is determined to drag everyone along to the conclusion with him but at this point whatever unique character the book possessed has just become a big mess. Its not bad but it feels profoundly unfocused and more work than it should be.
But through all three books the Ler remain an unique creation and even if Foster's ability to come up with plots worthy of them flags a bit after the relative feverishness of "Gameplayers" they still manage to keep things interesting whenever the books remember to focus on them. He's able to convey a completely different cultural worldview, perhaps not up there with the best, but a solid second-tier and the mixed bag of the third novel shouldn't detract from how much works with the first two books in the series. Foster will probably remain one of those quirky side avenues in SF (it looks like even this omnibus is out of print now), never quite making any "Best Of" lists but still worth exploring for people looking for something a little more on the obscure side.
July 9, 2019
It's summertime! Time to give the brain a rest and dive into some juicy, escapist fiction! The Book of the Ler is the first of two unrelated science fiction trilogies by Mark Foster and one that I picked up from the library by accident. See, I was looking for its successor, The Transformer Trilogy, the first book of which (The Morphodite) I remember reading and liking as a rip-roaring chase-thriller some 40-odd years ago, mistakenly thinking it to be an original work of Alan Dean Foster and without realizing or discovering that there were two more books to follow. So, mistake upon mistake, which at long last Amazon has now helped me to remedy.
In reading this review, it's worth noting that The Book of the Ler is thus fighting disappointment, confusion, and nostalgia, a pretty toxic mixture to take on at an investment of 923 pages. Still, Foster isn't helping himself by the way he assembled this. The author's first work was The Warriors of Dawn (Book 2 of this set), a story which sort of presaged the "Enemy Mine" survival tale of mistrustful alien enemies in time of war forced to (begrudgingly) cooperate, a genetically-modified human "Ler" taking the role of the Louis Gossett, Jr. lizard creature. There's more (and less) going on, including a sociological investigation of a Ler faction that has rejected noble-savage pacifism for piratical barbarism, but you have the gist. As Foster's first tango with Ler, he has to fall back on a good deal of exposition, and this he does via the perspective of human interlopers (who thus serve as audience surrogates) to contrast the protagonist, peaceable Ler against the belligerent faction (of Ler). Well, one does what one must.
At some point Foster must have been convinced that he had something here, and he set out to write a prequel. This is the ambitious and hefty Gameplayers of Zan, a work which opens and consumes fully half the length of the entire trilogy and the one which now introduces readers to the Ler world. In Zan, Foster tackles the events which trigger the Ler's escape from Earth to colonize distant planets, in the process digging deeply into 500 years of Ler evolution and cultural development, to say nothing of latter-day human sociology. There's Dune-scale world-building potential here. As it happens, Foster's style is a tad dry and meandering, but set these deficiencies along with some male gaze issues aside. Let's see how Foster executes.
The author starts with real promise inside the head of a Ler juvenile who we come to realize (a) has been captured and (b) placed in a sensory deprivation tank. This is a great curtain raiser in that it spurs immediate questions. What is a "Ler?" Is there significance to Ler gender and/or age? Who is this captured Ler girl? Who has captured her? What was she doing when she was captured? Where was she captured? Why was she captured? What if anything does the place of her confinement signify?
Foster goes from tweaking to piquing my curiosity at pages 24-25 (a long time to spend in sensory deprivation… meandering, remember):
Okay, now we're talking!
Except we're not. The opener turns out to be a fake-out, it's sole purpose to establish the hostility of humans toward Ler. It will be another lengthy chapter or more before a setting is properly sketched in. Oh, sure, there's much on the lives and lifestyles of the Ler (the author rather clumsily uses a Ler reservation visitor's center docent to deliver this exposition) but the crucial pivot to storytelling, namely a protagonist or point of view, has yet to arrive. Uh, Foster? I'm starting to get bored.
At last we learn that here at the borderlands humans exist in an overpopulated, paranoid, urban, Malthusian, fascist, 1984-style regime alongside a Ler wilderness preserve roughly the location of western Europe. New questions spring to mind, a bit less interesting given the information vacuum that remains of Ler biology, society, and political structure. What has brought humanity to this circumstance? How localized or widespread is this structure? Is history significant to the story? Does the author's juxaposition of Ler and humanity have a thematic purpose?
Now more backstory for our character sheets. It seems that the Ler were the unintended result of failed superhuman bioengineering experimentation that the humans then tried without success to eradicate. The details of this are hazy, suffice it to say that the Ler have been left to their own devices for six or more generations now and it's presumably only a matter of time before humanity re-presses its genocidal intent. This political conflict will be the engine to drive Zan's story forward.
Should I be rooting for the Ler, the humans, for peace via deescalation, or simply for resolution? I don't know, and I still lack a principal point of view character to lead my investigation. Perhaps the Ler docent? At this point, Foster's universe and his story are leaving me cold, but I'm sticking with it in hopes that the author purports some insightful analogy or commentary that pays off all the shenanigans and lugubrious backstory. Alas, not to be. After 400+ pages of investment, a key Ler cast member turns out to be a "psychotic," a plot twist which forces me to set aside all the author's rules and worldbuilding simply so Foster can write himself out of a corner. Will the subsequent books in the trilogy pick up where Zan leaves off? We already know they won't. Why bother?
Ah, well. I have still some summertime left and the other Mark Foster trilogy on my nightstand. Crossing fingers that I find better luck with that.
In reading this review, it's worth noting that The Book of the Ler is thus fighting disappointment, confusion, and nostalgia, a pretty toxic mixture to take on at an investment of 923 pages. Still, Foster isn't helping himself by the way he assembled this. The author's first work was The Warriors of Dawn (Book 2 of this set), a story which sort of presaged the "Enemy Mine" survival tale of mistrustful alien enemies in time of war forced to (begrudgingly) cooperate, a genetically-modified human "Ler" taking the role of the Louis Gossett, Jr. lizard creature. There's more (and less) going on, including a sociological investigation of a Ler faction that has rejected noble-savage pacifism for piratical barbarism, but you have the gist. As Foster's first tango with Ler, he has to fall back on a good deal of exposition, and this he does via the perspective of human interlopers (who thus serve as audience surrogates) to contrast the protagonist, peaceable Ler against the belligerent faction (of Ler). Well, one does what one must.
At some point Foster must have been convinced that he had something here, and he set out to write a prequel. This is the ambitious and hefty Gameplayers of Zan, a work which opens and consumes fully half the length of the entire trilogy and the one which now introduces readers to the Ler world. In Zan, Foster tackles the events which trigger the Ler's escape from Earth to colonize distant planets, in the process digging deeply into 500 years of Ler evolution and cultural development, to say nothing of latter-day human sociology. There's Dune-scale world-building potential here. As it happens, Foster's style is a tad dry and meandering, but set these deficiencies along with some male gaze issues aside. Let's see how Foster executes.
The author starts with real promise inside the head of a Ler juvenile who we come to realize (a) has been captured and (b) placed in a sensory deprivation tank. This is a great curtain raiser in that it spurs immediate questions. What is a "Ler?" Is there significance to Ler gender and/or age? Who is this captured Ler girl? Who has captured her? What was she doing when she was captured? Where was she captured? Why was she captured? What if anything does the place of her confinement signify?
Foster goes from tweaking to piquing my curiosity at pages 24-25 (a long time to spend in sensory deprivation… meandering, remember):
She had always had, all along, one escape. But it was a drastic, irrevocable one. With total recall, the ler mind had by compensation also gained the ability to trueforget, erase data, remove it. The one balanced the other. It was something rather more than forgetting in the old sense, as the forerunners referred to it. That, in truth, was merely mislaying data. But autoforgetting was erasure. It was easy and simple to start the process -- one knew instinctively how to to do that…. Stopping it was only for the experienced and the learned, enormously difficult…. And so for her it could be only everything or nothing… one simply picked some point in any valid memory and undid the image, like picking a thread out of a weave: it then unraveled. And then the ego, the persona, would be gone, vanished, as if it had never been, save for the existential traces left behind on the lives of others…. the ego would be gone…. Afterward, her human interrogators would return and discover that all they had was an infant in a twenty-year-old's body. (pages 24-5)The author has now posited a Twilight Zone-level premise to a reader whose information about this universe has to this point been limited to a girl in the black box. What does it mean to be a blank, a "forgetty," to have one's persona rebuilt from scratch? What sort of culture emerges around creatures with this (and other) alien capabilities? How might that culture interact or co-evolve alongside humanity?
Okay, now we're talking!
Except we're not. The opener turns out to be a fake-out, it's sole purpose to establish the hostility of humans toward Ler. It will be another lengthy chapter or more before a setting is properly sketched in. Oh, sure, there's much on the lives and lifestyles of the Ler (the author rather clumsily uses a Ler reservation visitor's center docent to deliver this exposition) but the crucial pivot to storytelling, namely a protagonist or point of view, has yet to arrive. Uh, Foster? I'm starting to get bored.
At last we learn that here at the borderlands humans exist in an overpopulated, paranoid, urban, Malthusian, fascist, 1984-style regime alongside a Ler wilderness preserve roughly the location of western Europe. New questions spring to mind, a bit less interesting given the information vacuum that remains of Ler biology, society, and political structure. What has brought humanity to this circumstance? How localized or widespread is this structure? Is history significant to the story? Does the author's juxaposition of Ler and humanity have a thematic purpose?
Now more backstory for our character sheets. It seems that the Ler were the unintended result of failed superhuman bioengineering experimentation that the humans then tried without success to eradicate. The details of this are hazy, suffice it to say that the Ler have been left to their own devices for six or more generations now and it's presumably only a matter of time before humanity re-presses its genocidal intent. This political conflict will be the engine to drive Zan's story forward.
Should I be rooting for the Ler, the humans, for peace via deescalation, or simply for resolution? I don't know, and I still lack a principal point of view character to lead my investigation. Perhaps the Ler docent? At this point, Foster's universe and his story are leaving me cold, but I'm sticking with it in hopes that the author purports some insightful analogy or commentary that pays off all the shenanigans and lugubrious backstory. Alas, not to be. After 400+ pages of investment, a key Ler cast member turns out to be a "psychotic," a plot twist which forces me to set aside all the author's rules and worldbuilding simply so Foster can write himself out of a corner. Will the subsequent books in the trilogy pick up where Zan leaves off? We already know they won't. Why bother?
Ah, well. I have still some summertime left and the other Mark Foster trilogy on my nightstand. Crossing fingers that I find better luck with that.
June 5, 2012
More a trio of short novels than a large book, this collection of stories takes you across the stars to often technologically backwards planets that have been out of civilization for so long that their true history has taken the form of myths. In book 1, the Ler are introduced. This species was created by mankind looking for a superhuman species. Instead, they just got a different cousin type species that had different values and ideas from their creators. They focus on a game, which leads them to a new destiny.
In book 2, taking place hundreds of years later, humans and Lers have occupied the far reaches of space. A joint expedition is sent out to determine what has happened to a violent group of Lers and why they have deviated so far from their origins.
In book 3, another long time jump later (hundreds to thousands of years), a planet full of humans that have been bred to be racially pure (there's a race that's been bred for working with technology, one for fair skin and red hair, one for hard labor, etc, etc. There, a new human/Ler expedition seeks to discover how this planet eroded and how to fix life for these previously segregated and bred humans.
All in all, while the books are only loosely related, that lax connection aids the mythical nature of all the stories of the various people in these novels and explores how moments in the time and evolution of various species can get lost to history and distort the understanding of the present and the expectations for the future. By looking at time frames through stories that take place over a span of thousands of years, the author explores the goals and aims of mankind, the ultimate proximity all civilizations retain to the caves from where they sprung, and how beliefs, myths and histories are built into the cultures that they in turn help to shape.
In book 2, taking place hundreds of years later, humans and Lers have occupied the far reaches of space. A joint expedition is sent out to determine what has happened to a violent group of Lers and why they have deviated so far from their origins.
In book 3, another long time jump later (hundreds to thousands of years), a planet full of humans that have been bred to be racially pure (there's a race that's been bred for working with technology, one for fair skin and red hair, one for hard labor, etc, etc. There, a new human/Ler expedition seeks to discover how this planet eroded and how to fix life for these previously segregated and bred humans.
All in all, while the books are only loosely related, that lax connection aids the mythical nature of all the stories of the various people in these novels and explores how moments in the time and evolution of various species can get lost to history and distort the understanding of the present and the expectations for the future. By looking at time frames through stories that take place over a span of thousands of years, the author explores the goals and aims of mankind, the ultimate proximity all civilizations retain to the caves from where they sprung, and how beliefs, myths and histories are built into the cultures that they in turn help to shape.
Read
September 12, 2013I would like to thank DAW books for enabling my nostalgia kick rereading of books I read in high school.
I got this for The Gameplayers of Zan, which I remember liking a whole lot. The other two books were written earlier and are trivial.
The Gameplayers of Zan takes place on Earth, where human overpopulation has resulted in an regimented, hierarchical, and homogenous society. The ler number in the thousands, I think, and live on a reservation, with a low population density and a deliberately primitive lifestyle. The exploration of the ler culture is the best part.
The book opens with the thirty-page interior monologue (indirect discourse, not first person) of a woman in a sensory deprivation chamber, meditating on space, history, order, chance, the evolution of human societies, and adolescent sexual experiences. No wonder it reminded me of C.J. Cherryh. But god is Foster verbose. The bit about a ler woman teaching humans and then going home on a monorail through the woods isn't any less slow, self-reflective, and expository than the bits in the sensory deprivation chamber. There are footnotes, although given the amount of information Foster was willing to put into narrative exposition, I'm not sure why he needed them. I was thinking about trying some of Foster's later books, but I'm not sure I can get through the prose without the ameliorating effects of nostalgia.
I got this for The Gameplayers of Zan, which I remember liking a whole lot. The other two books were written earlier and are trivial.
The Gameplayers of Zan takes place on Earth, where human overpopulation has resulted in an regimented, hierarchical, and homogenous society. The ler number in the thousands, I think, and live on a reservation, with a low population density and a deliberately primitive lifestyle. The exploration of the ler culture is the best part.
The book opens with the thirty-page interior monologue (indirect discourse, not first person) of a woman in a sensory deprivation chamber, meditating on space, history, order, chance, the evolution of human societies, and adolescent sexual experiences. No wonder it reminded me of C.J. Cherryh. But god is Foster verbose. The bit about a ler woman teaching humans and then going home on a monorail through the woods isn't any less slow, self-reflective, and expository than the bits in the sensory deprivation chamber. There are footnotes, although given the amount of information Foster was willing to put into narrative exposition, I'm not sure why he needed them. I was thinking about trying some of Foster's later books, but I'm not sure I can get through the prose without the ameliorating effects of nostalgia.
September 4, 2024
This trilogy is not by any means single story. There are three very different stories in each of the three books The game players was the most interesting however the other two also had interesting parts as well and are worth reading.
January 26, 2026
Phenomenal. Brilliant. Unique. A new alien species that's not an import, one that's created right here, an artificial branch of humanity – the same but different – in a new society that's very different. The relationship between the 2 species is necessarily fraught, yet not overblown. He put a lot of thought into this, and it shows. Not just thoughtful, it's inspired.
January 14, 2015
This compilation of three out of print books is worth buying just for the one story that falls chronologically first though published second: The Game Players of Zan.
The other two stories are only loosely related and are really not worth reading.
The writing can be a bit boring at times and the author is far too fond of huge info dumps for the modern audience, but it is still a classic with some amazingly original ideas. Brilliant world building.
The Game Players of Zan is sort of a mystery but the mystery itself turns out to be petty and uninteresting. The brilliance is in the world building. The author has created an entirely artificial society and species that were designed rather than evolved and explores what that might be like.
The Ler or "new people" as they call themselves are a race created be human from humans to be superior. The next step in evolution. The experiment is somewhat of a failure from their creators point of view, but the Ler create their own society with its own rules and live apart from humans.
Everything about them, from their choice to live simply (primitively by human judgment) to their family system called braids is utterly fascinating. Exactly how the braids works is very simply and directly explained the Warriors of Dawn, but it is more interesting in The Game Players of Zan, which I read first. The reader is sort of pulled along into their world and it all more than a little exotic. Even though their society was created wholly in one generation by the first created beings, it feels natural and organic. even though they are are mostly human generically, they feel alien and yet understandable.
It is a must read classic story.
The other two stories are only loosely related and are really not worth reading.
The writing can be a bit boring at times and the author is far too fond of huge info dumps for the modern audience, but it is still a classic with some amazingly original ideas. Brilliant world building.
The Game Players of Zan is sort of a mystery but the mystery itself turns out to be petty and uninteresting. The brilliance is in the world building. The author has created an entirely artificial society and species that were designed rather than evolved and explores what that might be like.
The Ler or "new people" as they call themselves are a race created be human from humans to be superior. The next step in evolution. The experiment is somewhat of a failure from their creators point of view, but the Ler create their own society with its own rules and live apart from humans.
Everything about them, from their choice to live simply (primitively by human judgment) to their family system called braids is utterly fascinating. Exactly how the braids works is very simply and directly explained the Warriors of Dawn, but it is more interesting in The Game Players of Zan, which I read first. The reader is sort of pulled along into their world and it all more than a little exotic. Even though their society was created wholly in one generation by the first created beings, it feels natural and organic. even though they are are mostly human generically, they feel alien and yet understandable.
It is a must read classic story.
Currently Reading
May 22, 2008Too sad - this book was spoiled to begin with by an unfortunate run in with an old lecher at Barnes & Noble. Sigh - I hope its so good that I forget all about him.
December 27, 2014
Contains 'The Gameplayers of Zan' which is sublime, intelligent sci-fi and probably the best book I have ever read.
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