The Book of the Ler Book

"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.