Michael Anthony Foster (July 2, 1939 – November 14, 2020) was an American science fiction writer from Greensboro, North Carolina. He spent over sixteen years as a captain and Russian linguist in the United States Air Force.
"Ler" books Foster 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. Most of the action in this book takes place in Unwharrie National Forest, North Carolina. Ler reproduce infrequently, only becoming fertile at age thirty after a long adolescence: they experience two fertility periods, five years apart. Hence 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," which they have designed to preserve maximum genetic diversity to offset their low initial population and small birth rate. A braid starts with two "fore-parents". They mate and produce the "elder outsibling". Then each of the fore-parents goes forth and brings back another ler of the appropriate gender, the "after-parents". The fore-parents each mate with an after-parent and produce the "insiblings", five years younger than the elder outsibling. Then the after-parents mate and produce the "younger outsibling", five years younger than the insiblings. The insiblings remain in the braid and become the fore-parents to the next generation; the outsiblings will leave to join other braids as after-parents. The rare surplus children tend to be given the responsibility of beginning completely new braids together. Alternation in the gender of children is enforced with pheromones. In rare cases, sometimes on purpose, two same-sex insiblings are born; the braid line ends there, as all four children must weave into other braids as after-parents. Ler communicate mainly using a verbal language called Singlespeech. Each ler has a name consisting of three syllables, e.g. "Maellenkleth", 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 four-syllable names. As in the Chinese language, each Singlespeech syllable has four possible meanings, but unlike Chinese, Singlespeech is not a tonal language. Instead, each Singlespeech word has four "modes" corresponding to the four classical Greek elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), with each mode having a symbolic meaning borrowed from the Divinatory tarot, and complex grammatical rules govern the allowed transitions from mode to mode. The meanings of Singlespeech words are therefore highly context-dependent, and careful attention must be paid to mode transitions during a conversation. Elemental symbolism extends also to the meanings of ler personal names, but each individual keeps their "governing element" a secret; this latter custom complicates ler marriage negotiations, since each foreparent must choose the other foreparents' second (afterparent) mate, and the governing elements of each foreparent/afterparent mating must be complementary: Earth with Air, and Fire with Water. 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 in a much more detailed fashion than Singlespeech ever could. After the completion of the Ler trilogy, Foster continued to work on the development and explication of Singlespeech, which he renamed Layaklan (which name back-translates to 'Understanding' in English). A substantial Layaklan-to-English lexicon and an outline of a corresponding English-to-Layaklan lexicon (both of which were written by Foster), accompanied by supporting articles concerning Layaklan, were available online but were subsequently lost.
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