Warriors of Dawn [Mass Market Paperback]

I agree completely with the earlier reviewer of this book - I wrote a review of "The Gameplayers of Zan" a couple of years ago which unfortunately seems to appear here as a different book (see M.A. Foster). The non-availability of these and other books by Foster is a complete mystery, as is their little-known status: if only they could be recognised and re-issued as the classics they are. My copies of both "Warriors" and the third book, "Day of the Klesh", came via Amazon USA's book search, for which I'm eternally grateful.

One bright note is that used copies of both "Gameplayers" and "Warriors" appear to be available via the Marketplace, so at least a few more people have the opportunity to enjoy these classic books. If you can track down Foster's other books, the "Morphodite Trilogy" or "Waves", these two will deliver absorbing reading: "Waves", in particular, is brilliantly atmospheric.

Back to this book: Foster's setting of the sequels hundreds or thousands of years apart is one of the delights, as you can gradually pick up the history that we, as readers, know, but is only available to the characters through myths and partial records. So the villain of the first book has become a saint, in the legends of the characters in the third...

Read it if you can!

Why isn't M A Foster widely acknowledged as the author of one of the greatest SF books ever penned (Gameplayers of Zan)? Why isn't it a movie? Can people with two opposable thumbs be beyond the ingenuity of modern CGI? No, I take that back: please don't make a dumb action movie out of books with characters with such rich inner lives!

A sequel to the truly amazing 'Gameplayers', here Foster develops the theme of alien encounter, except as before the aliens are genetically engineered humans who have elected to separate themselves largely from precursor Homo Sapiens.

Where Zan fleshes out for the first time a compelling and plausible society of the Ler, the New Humans, pitted against a merciless human bureaucracy, Warriors of Dawn is about the burgeoning relationship between one human male and one Ler female sent on a mission to investigate a supposed impossibility amongst the hypercivilized new humans - barbarian Ler.

The events of Gameplayers have faded into history. Now humans and Ler have become spacefarers, expanding along the spiral arms of the Milky Way in opposite directions in an uneasy truce. However, the depredations of the renegade Ler warriors threaten this rapprochement. Two investigators are sent on a discreet mission to prevent wide-scale conflict between their species. This forms the backdrop to Foster's main theme - the consequences of genetic manipulation and the emergence of alien consciousness out of our own genome. And no one, save perhaps Frank Herbert, has done it better.

Although not quite as magnificent as the first book, Warriors is nevertheless indispensable and amply shows Foster's gift for creating a genuine sense of otherness that illuminates our own existence. Unfortunately, this is also hard to obtain (the third book, Day of the Klesh, took me 23 years to find!). It's high time an enlightened publisher acquired the rights and reissued all these books. Let's hope the Gollancz SF Masterworks series will one day include at least one. Note: as of 2007, all three book in the Ler Trilogy are available as an omnibus edition.