M. A. Foster
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Michael Anthony Foster is a science fiction writer, born in Greensboro, North Carolina on July 2, 1939. He spent over sixteen years as a Captain and Russian linguist in the United States Air Force. He currently lives in Greensboro with his wife.
[edit] "Ler" books
He wrote a loosely-connected trilogy about an offshoot of humanity called the Ler: The Warriors of Dawn(1975), The Gameplayers of Zan(1977), and The Day of The Klesh(1979). The Gameplayers of Zan takes place much earlier than the others, on Earth, and details the Ler's departure from Earth; the other two books cover two separate human-Ler encounters on other planets. The "game" from the title of The Gameplayers of Zan is based on cellular automata, a more intricate version of Conway's Game of Life.
The Warriors of Dawn mostly concerns the relationship between a human man and a ler woman, and The Day of The Klesh represents the ler as a mostly inscrutable humanoid race. The Gameplayers of Zan, on the other hand, discusses the origins of the Ler as an engineered offshoot of humanity, and is as much about ler culture as their interactions with humanity.
Ler reproduce infrequently, generally becoming fertile only every ten years. Most ler females have only two children, but occasionally they have a third, and twins are not unknown.
Ler family structure is organized around a "braid". A braid starts with two "in-parents". They mate and produce the "elder outsibling". Then each of the in-parents goes forth and brings back another ler of the appropriate gender, the "out-parents". The in-parents each mate with an out-parent and produce the "insiblings", ten years younger than the elder outsibling. Then the out-parents mate and produce the "younger outsibling", ten years younger than the insiblings. The insiblings remain in the braid and become the in-parents to the next generation; the outsiblings will leave to join other braids as out-parents. The rare surplus children tend to be given the responsibility of beginning completely new braids together.
Ler communicate mainly using a verbal language called Singlespeech. Each ler has a name consisting of three syllables, e.g. "Mallenkleth", though their intimates sometimes use shortened versions of the name. Various categories of objects always have names with the same numbers of syllables, e.g. stars have five-syllable names. There is also a less-frequently used mode of communication called Multispeech, which uses all the available communication channels, verbal and nonverbal, to convey information much more rapidly than Singlespeech ever could.
[edit] Others
More closely connected are the Morphodite trilogy: The Morphodite(1981), Transformer(1983), and Preserver(1985). The title character is a bioengineered assassin who can change forms, alternating sex and decreasing in age as it does so.
He also wrote the standalone novel Waves(1980), and four novelettes collected in Owl Time(1985).
He writes an occasional column for Acme Comics called Eyeless In Gaza.
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