The Warriors of Dawn

Ler #1

by M.A. Foster

DAW Books, 1980. Paperback, stated 5th printing. This 1975 novel is the first in the "Ler" trilogy, which also includes "The Gameplayers of Zan" (1977) and "The Day of the Klesh" (1979). Humans and superhuman variants expand into space.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy

278 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

DAW Collectors #135

Cover Artist: Kelly Freas.

Name: Foster, Michael Anthony, Birthplace: Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, 02 July 1939

Human civilization has fused into a single Dystopian society which shares Earth with the Ler, a genetically engineered subspecies of humanity who live rustically on a reserve. The novel offers a chance to explore this “alien” culture and their biological and societal differences from humans. It’s also a thriller. As characters slowly begin to perceive that a massive and mysterious conspiracy is afoot. Caught up in a grand design, a barely perceived pattern.

The 'Ler' series:
1. The Warriors of Dawn (1975)
2. The Gameplayers of Zan (1977)
3. The Day of the Klesh (1979)
The Book of The Ler (2006)

[JHM · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all: Pay No Attention to the "#1" in this title. This is the second book of the series. It takes place a very long time after The Gamplayers of Zan, and if you haven't read Gameplayers then you will not appreciate this book's references to the past, nor will you have anywhere near as good an understanding of Ler culture.

This is a difficult book to rate because it is so uneven. The overall quality of the prose itself is very good, but the plot progresses in fits and starts. About midway through I was ready to put it down out of sheet boredom. Too much time was spent with characters moving from one place to another, with lots of descriptions about the environment but not much else going on. The characters are engaging, but not particularly deep. Worst of all, Foster spent far too much time "telling" instead of showing, and some of the biggest victories were the result of very big intuitive leaps. Not impossible ones, but still big, and conveyed with lots of 'telling.'

In the end, the story was worth reading, but it is far inferior to The Gameplayers of Zan in virtually every way.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 the trilogy 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.

[Jim Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the far future, humans and near-human artificially created people called ler have colonized a corner of the galaxy. Mostly they stay apart, though in a few cases they have worked together. But reports have come in of an attack by unknown raiders on the jointly-colonized planet of Chalcedon. Han, a young human trader and pilot, and Liszendir, a ler woman with extreme hand-to-hand combat skills, are sent to investigate. What results is a series of escapes and adventures, including a harrowing trek across the planet Dawn, home of the raiders. In the process, they discover a much deeper plot hiding behind the surface.

Foster has been compared to Jack Vance, and there are similarities. The ker are a remarkably well drawn and intricate society, who form complicated family braids. Likewise, the various humans that are bred and keep as pets or slaves by the warriors have a Vance-like feel. Yet Foster has his own voice; his prose doesn't have the sparkle or the somewhat ironic undertone that Vance often employed. Instead, he delves deeply into his characters, and in fact as the book progresses it's the relationships between those characters that most drive the book forward.

This is the first of a series, one that shows promise. Foster appears to have written half a dozen books or so, then stopped. If the others are as good as this one, that's a shame.

[SciFiOne · Rating 5 out of 5]

1986 grade A-
2015 grade A-/B+

Series book L1

- - This is a very good book. The characters and story are complex and detailed and have a lot of growth and depth. The pace includes both slow and fast areas with action and detail.
- - But it is also a long a difficult read which I had to do in segments. There are several slow long journeys and past the first 100 or so pages, many of the paragraphs are long data dumps or dialog based lectures. I had difficulty speed reading these via skimming and finally ended up reading the opening sentences and skipping to the next paragraph. That seemed to work just fine since there were not problems with continuity.
- - In summary, I like it very much and hope to read it a third time some day. Maybe I can find book two of the series, which I have not read.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amusing sci-fi that started so well. It turned into a stark and detailed journey to an alien world. The villians are well drawn out and the plot is somewhat interesting. The personal relationships could have been a hair sharper but I saw very few typos or other such problems. This book is just in the okay pile. I like to be wowed or inspired. Science fiction just does not inspire me very often. This story just lacks the indefinable spark that sets me on fire. Perhaps it will light the torch for someone else. This book is on its way to my wife's work to find a new home. =)

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 reread of this 1975 novel, Foster's first. It's an amazingly accomplished first novel, but its climax is, well, pretty clumsy. Definitely some first-novel rough spots. But I love his lyrical writing style , and the world-building is first rate. In particular, the planet Dawn, a barely-inhabitable world with mountains that reach well above the atmosphere, and eight seasons per year, is a tour de force -- especially since Han and Liszendir, the two main characters, end up having to walk across much of its surface, suffering from altitude-sickness and very nearly starving along the way. Foster recovers his poise nicely in the pastorale that concludes the book. 3.7 stars, recommended reading.

Jo Walton comments on the LER series in her 1991 retro-review of "The Gameplayers of Zan" (1977): https://www.tor.com/2009/05/08/alien-...
The comments there are also worth reading. She prefers that book, which is the prequel to DAWN. I liked it too, and plan to re-read it. If you aren't familiar with Foster's work, his Wikipedia page is a good introduction :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._A._F...

[Nuno Lourenço · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bolas, quanto mais avancei na leitura, mais pesada esta se tornou e menos coerente se tornou o livro. A criação do povo ler será a grande conquista do autor. No entanto a caracterização perde-se no meio de uma trama que começa bem, mas que se perde num emaranhado de acontecimentos mal desenvolvidos que se atropelam, com tiradas esotéricas (?) que não conduzem a lado nenhum e em que até as tentativas de humor parecem deslocadas.

Deixa entrever outros seres, outras raças humanas criadas como animais de estimação, que podem ter tido alguma continuidade na terceira parte da trilogia, Mas desconheço e não fiquei com grande vontade de conhecer.

Bolas.

[Road Worrier · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were many interesting ideas.

But there were really only five characters in the book, and it was difficult to suspend my disbelief to see how the characters keep running into each other as the book goes on.

The big bad enemy is given no personhood, and barely any motivation. I hate villains with no perceivable motivation.

The relationships that grew between some of the characters though, were precious and sweet.

I liked the Gameplayers book (which was written after but chronologically earlier than this book) much better.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book of high drudgery caused by dry prose and tedious expositions. Swamped by lengthy didactic explanations the narrative fails to float in an ocean of turgid critiques of alien societies. Despite some passable world building and intriguing ideas about eugenics and genetics it just didn’t do it for me. I purchased the sequel at the same time as this, which, according to GR is a better book. Might give it a go next decade.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a sci-fi book written by a scientist (an astronomer) so many of the elements of physics and space, while not explored in any great detail, have an interesting feel-- this guy talks about space in a very simple, straight-forward, every-day manner. He doesn't belabor the subject.

The story was a little slow for me, although character development was smooth. Conventions were faultless.

[Ike · Rating 3 out of 5]

One word = alien

[Copper Eldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raunchy mid-70s scifi at its best

[Debeehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really didn't hold my interest. I think part of the problem was the writing style, which came across to me as choppy and disconnected, and part of it was that I just didn't find his ler as compelling as the author seemed to. About the most interesting thing was Usteyn's story block which I thought was a really cool idea and would have liked to see more of, also the ending was effective at creating a sense of completeness. Still, I don't see myself rereading this any time soon .....

[Ben Myhre · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about 60% through this first of the series... anticipating that I would read all of them.

Unfortunately, I just could not get into it. There were some interesting ideas, but when it gets to the point where I am reading words only to drudge through them... and you are 1t 60%... it is time to put the book down.

Perhaps I will make another go at it, but for now, I could not give this a good recommendation.

[Adrik Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best sci if I have ever read. The klesh resonated with me particularly but I also enjoyed the detailed 'alien' societies and who doesn't love a space opera?

[Bruce E.]

I read this years ago. It is philosophically a little dated, but I still loved it.