The Gameplayers of Zan

Ler #2

by M.A. Foster

Book by Foster, M. A.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, American, Science Fiction Fantasy

445 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

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

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all-time favorite sci fi books, and hasn't received nearly the acclaim that it should. The characters are well drawn, and the setting is amazing. The concept of "weapons that leave the hand" is something that has stayed with me for years. The premier example of how science fiction can illuminate real life, in my opinion.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a significant work of science fiction. Like all important science fiction this book can involve and enmesh the reader. There is an alternate world on the earth of the future. Two races of human exist. There are forerunners, who are old humans like us. There are the ler, who are a new species of human. These ler are smaller than most humans and live longer, having delayed maturation.

Like all good books, the characters in this book face moral dilemmas and decisions. There is a major decision that the ler had to make which lead to the point of contention between the species. The heroine in the story has a difficult decision to make near the beginning of the book. The path she travels sets up the action and storyline for the remainder of the book.

I am so impressed with this work. Every page causes me to think deep thoughts and wonder at implications of the ideas presented. I am not saying the ideas are good or sensible ideas. But, I was driven to think about things. It is said that the author worked for secretive agencies of the U.S. government at times in his career. This gives added weight to the portrayal of secretive agencies in the book.

Now to try to think about who might enjoy this book, or not. Even fans of this book would admit there are a lot of info dumps. I mean, really a lot. The book would probably lose half its length without info dumps. But, for me they served a valid purpose. The author is introducing new cultures that are drastically different from our traditional world. The author has an excuse for downloading a great deal of facts and information. But I can imagine some readers losing patience. The ideal reader will be fascinated with reading about a new type of human and how they have structured their society so differently from the forerunners.

[JHM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better than I remembered it being. The world/culture building is detailed and convincing, the characters compelling, and the shifting perspectives artfully advance the plot without giving too much away.

[Jason Pryde · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. I wonder if, like cars and rock & roll music, every generation produces a distinctive style in this genre. Perhaps the 70's, when this book was written, writers tended toward a careful balance or blending of humanity and fantasy. Unlike more recent books (such as 1Q84), the characters, even the whimsical Ler, are grounded in universal emotions and personality flaws. Their greatest strengths are in the same kind of willful determination that empower the protagonists in non-fiction narratives.
Towards the end of the book, the main protagonist meets the main antagonist in a contrived mental world, akin to a parallel universe, where they have it out through mental manipulation of the world. This is all deep fantasy but the emotions and arguments expressed between the two are still expressions of human weakness or strength. When the antagonist admits to shooting an arrow at the protagonist back in the real world, she says she missed on purpose but the protagonist calls her on claiming this after the fact, essentially, calling her a liar. A lazier writer would have just left it up to the reader to decide. This completeness of the character makes the moral of the story far more plausible than situations where the paranormal is the deciding factor in the plot.

I've noticed in this and other novels I've read lately that certain characters have a tendency to notice and to listen to a faint voice inside their head that directs their action at critical moments. This is not supernatural. We all have incomplete information and the analytical ability to detect and articulate inconsistencies in the wealth of data that we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. The mature individual realizes that a clear disconnect between facts is usually a good place to start when unravelling a mystery.

In a story line, this is just another plot device but it can also be used when an author has written themselves into a hole that has no logical resolution. Much like when the calvary comes riding over the pass just as the bad guys are about to take over the ranch.
(There's a literary term for this which I can't remember right now.)
I find it fun to look for these disconnects before they are actually spelled out by the author, but I am hate to see the authors use the words "...He had a nagging feeling he was missing something obvious..." too often.

An important strength of this book, which might have been a trend in past generations, is that almost nothing is introduced that isn't pertinent later in the book. Characters are introduced in ways that are relevant to their role in the story. Even small details like one man's habitual tripping over a root in the ground on the path to the outhouse, turns out to have a significance later on in. In a lot of stories today, such loose ends are left for later sequels, if at all.

Lastly, I read this book over several weeks in short bursts of 15 or 20 minutes each day. For whatever reason, I was able to sustain the characters and plot without having to go back to re-read parts just to stay current. My memory is not usually that good. I think it is a credit to the organization of the story, both temporally and geographically, that the facts were so memorable.

Good book. I might read the sequel "The Warriors of Dawn".

[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 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.

[Kingsley Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my top two books. A spectacularly crafted sci-fi, crime, mystery novel. Deeply crafted and well-executed. Set in a not too distant future where there are two species on earth. Humans and the genetically crafted Ler. Their sophistication and high level of achievement are counter intuitive to their simple agrarian-like culture of family 'craft' groups. The apparent simplicity is hides something that most Ler don't even know. Two lovers' past are deeply intertwined in the mystery that will affect Ler and Human alike. Stunning. Surprising and a delight to read.

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Premise: A few centuries in the future, humanity has progressed/degenerated into a bureaucractic monoculture--except for the Ler. The Ler are a group of genetically created superhumans, created to usher humanity into the next age. However, instead of said ushering, they have shifted into a subsistence culture of clans and families, and live on a massive reserve as kind of a failed experiment. All groups work towards this subsistence (and occasionally still coming up with minor inventions for the rest of earth), except for two groups who are devoted to the Game of Zan, a recreational activity. The plot thickens when a gameplayer is captured by the Earth government, and rather than admit to what she's doing and why, she erases her own mind. Separately, government forces and Ler try to solve the mystery, before one group may destroy the other.

This was... weird. And unfortunately, more slow weird than interesting weird. There's a lot of time spent on Ler culture, which is kind of a mix between aboriginal North American culture, fantasy elves, and planned society. And a fair bit of time also spent on what the Earth monoculture looks like, when it's Machiavellian bureaucracy all the way down. It feels very weird to erase all the world's actual indigenous cultures in the face of capitalism and one world government, then instead of presenting a resurgence or something, make up a wholly new culture. And for all that we're told, repeatedly, that the ler have a very specific time of their life for mating, we sure get a lot of scenes with a middle aged male ler dwelling on female lers' bodies, especially teen girls. Definitely feels like a product of its time, in that sense.
In terms of gender issues, it's also weird in other ways. All of the non-Ler POVs or even characters we see are male; virtually all significant Ler characters, with the exception of the lead protagonist and a teen boy, are female. After the first ler POV, I was hoping we'd stick with her--she's a scientist who works jointly with Earth scientists, and I think she'd have an interesting perspective on the difference between their cultures and knowledge bases. But instead, it's mostly from the POV of one of her husbands/family leaders. He's frankly pretty boring--the most interesting thing about him was a teen secret affair with a teen Ler who was a prodigy of the game. And we're told repeated that she was so young she was barely a teen at the time, which seems unnecessary and kind of gross.

I want to talk more about the ending and the game itself, and there's really no doing either without spoiling that ending. Eventually, Team Ler stumbles on to the secret the girl was hiding: rather than being superficial recreation, the Game is actually training for the Lers' secret project, one so secret only high level Game Players know it: their entire society is a primitive smokescreen to hide from the rest of humanity that they're building an interstellar spaceship. Further, the Game provides training in the skills ler need to navigate the psychological nightmare required for such piloting. (It's an interesting approach to conceptualizing space travel; another book I'm reading right now, Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, takes a similar tact.) Both of those ideas are super interesting. How do the rest of the ler feel about learning that their way of life is a piece of fiction they're expected to now abandon? What kind of mysteries does space hold? The answers are not in this book, though my understanding is that Foster did explore them elsewhere. But it's disappointing: either would make for ideas worth exploring, but instead we get a spy intrigue plot that feels as if it never quite got off the ground, and a LOT of exposition on things that would have been more interesting to see unfold.

There's also some weird gender stuff in the Big Baddie of the story. The idea is that she's a Ler who broke bad after being trapped alone in a ship-piloting accident, and thus must be stopped from Unspecified Actions. It's good to have a sympathetic villain, but she's framed in such a way that it seems to remove her own agency. A conflict that was more about the purpose of the Ler and their goals and values as a people would be much more interesting a story.

And the subject of game. The idea of a game that seems trivial but actually masks a secret society and secret knowledge isn't a new idea, but it's one that I'm a huge fan of. To Foster's credit, there's a very detailed description of game play at one point, but it's pretty much all second hand, from the perspective of someone who doesn't really understand what they're seeing. Designing a full game and conveying it in a way that actually makes sense is a tall order for a book, though, so I'm not too harsh on this for that. Still, given the title, I wish there was more time spent with the actual gameplayers.

And that's it. I think the most damning thing I can say about the book is that it remained a bathroom book for my entire reading of it. Sometimes, when I have trouble getting into a book, I move it to the bathroom, so at least I'll pick it up when I'm... cogitating. And then, being forced into reading it, I'll eventually get into it, and move it out of the bathroom to read elsewhere. (After sanitizing.) The Gameplayers of Zan never graduated from being bathroom fare; I read the entirety of it in there. And yeah--that's disappointing.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Genetically engineered post-humans build a starship powered by cellular automata. Interesting but extremely wordy.

[Fred · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this on slashdot, where someone said it was a fantastic, under appreciated wonder. Unfortunately, I have to disagree.
As long as I can remember, I've been a bit of a speed reader, actually took an elective in high school which had some sort of test and score pretty fast ~100 pages per hour and about 80% compregension/retention. I've slowed down quite a bit as I've almost quite reading for pleasure for the past 20+ years.
However, this book was an absolute chore to read.
I love H.P. Lovecraft, however in a similar vein, Foster can write a tsunami wall of text for pages of detail about things that are ultimately minimally interesting or overly useful to the actual story. In today's parlance, I guess it would be something akin to world building/character development on steroids.

There are definately a number of good ideas, and it was refreshing to see the antagonist/human 'adversaries' not be molded in cliches, etc.

I would suggest getting this at a library either physical or epub type, I'd certainly be even sorrier if I'd spent money on this.

I think this writer got so involved in this story, and detailing it to the nth degree, that he lost track of the fact that there is a careful balance between detail and action.
Sometimes it works, in this case it didn't, for me.

[Ben Myhre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jesus this is a weird book. The world-building of the Ler is incredibly unique and interesting, but they spend so much time on it that it becomes a distraction. Although more familiar, the future human society he builds is also a bit alien.

It was a struggle to get through this one and if it were not for super interesting ideas that were dealt out throughout the book, I would have given it two stars.

[Roberto Fideli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tem uma construção de mundo e de estruturas sociais interessante, imaginativa e muito complexa, aos moldes de Jack Vance. Mas não consegui me engajar com o enredo denso ou com os personagens em nenhum momento e a tradução lusitana não ajudou.

[Road Worrier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique ideas. Fun puzzle/mystery to keep the narrative going.

Mildly disconcerting to spend the narrative with various people before finally settling on the main protagonist.

The very end wrap-up was a bit quick for my liking, but the completion of the mystery/story was satisfying.

[Rob Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is good. Very detailed and not at all action-packed. But a real classic.

[Barbara Denz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I re-read it every so often just to re-absorb how the "forgetee" becomes one. We now have 3 copies on our shelves because we keep loading it to friends and new readers.

[James]

Gameplayers of Zan

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first section of the book is so boring and slow then it picks up a bit. Very much an info-dump style of world building but the story itself is good.

[David Carmona · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like it but it was slow and nothing felt really revolutionary in concept. There were too many "data dumps" that went on and on - it helps build the world but I felt much was not necessary.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been one of my favourite sci-fi/fantasy novels for over 40 years. I’ve read this around 15 times and each reading repays with new understanding and hidden nuance (along the lines of Dune, Thomas Covenant or The Gap series). Its moody Winter setting has a melancholy that in my teens and twenties drew me back and back. Much of the action and even the stunning and ultimately uplifting resolution have a sad inevitably (in retrospect) that, yet, is always unexpected, never telegraphed and so maturely written, I was always amazed MA Foster had so little output. Only years later did I discover the other two ‘Ler’ novels. This is the second written but first chronologically. Reading all three you can really see the author’s progress as a writer. This and the third are both amazing, though drastically different. The second in the series (first written) is less secure in its writing style and doesn’t hang together as well. But it’s still an interesting plot link between the other two. And you can see how the ideas behind both of those might have sprung out of it. The Gameplayers of Zan would make a fantastic, intimate, moody but mind-exploding movie. If only someone with the necessary skill and subtlety could take it on. Sort of like Blade Runner’s or 1984’s moodiness set in a wet dripping forest, with a bit of Close Encounters’ spectacle to close it out. That’s always been my dream, anyway.

[Bruce E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it first years ago. I remembered liking it and I was not wrong. At times it feels very seventyish and it makes implicit wrong guesses about future technology--a problem for all near future books--, but it is excellent in its portrayal of human and Ler emotions. Read it.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-written book with a unique theme.

[SciFiOne]

Series book L2