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.
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).
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.
The meanings of Singlespeech words are therefore highly context-dependent, and careful attention must be paid to mode transitions during a conversation.
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).
The title character is a reluctant assassin who can change forms, invariably alternating sex and decreasing in age as he/she does so.
We discover why Rael is so feared shortly after "his" introduction--"he" has evolved a scientific method of predicting or divining the future.
That art is elaborated in Transformer, but in brief it is likened to a version of the I Ching that is both scientifically rigorous and orders of magnitude more complex.
But Damistofina is eventually identified as the Morphodite and pursued, leading her to kill her pursuer and Change yet again, this time to Phaedrus, a yet-younger male.
Eventually the upheaval grinds to a halt and Phaedrus gathers small groups of refugees to himself, becoming a sort of mind-healer.
Jedily was originally an observer who somehow displeased the Regents of Heliarctos and was dumped into The Mask Factory to be used up as a test subject.
Nazarine realizes both that she cannot Change again without becoming an infant and that the Regents (unknown to her at this point) won't stop trying to kill her.
Following back through her past, she recovers some of the documents from The Mask Factory that lets her determine that Jedily was an off-world observer.
Foster wrote an occasional column for Acme Comics called Eyeless In Gaza.