Date: 17 Nov 1983 14:11-EST From: Dan Hoey To: SF-LOVERS Subject: M. A. Foster I have enjoyed M. A. Foster's books for a long time, and also wondered about the author's sex. When book reviews and some discussions in SF-Lovers (around 1980-81?) used the male pronoun, I wondered. After all, Tiptree had everyone confused too, and there were those well-developed female characters in the books. Somehow the whole tone of tWoD seemed the kind of sensitive, caring writing that I have come to expect from Bradley, Clayton, and Norton and no male authors. My doubts were put to rest when I read (and I believe this was in SF-Lovers) a note from someone who knew Meg Foster and claimed she was the woman who wrote as M. A. Foster. Last month I went to RoVaCon and met Mike Foster, the author of all those good books. We talked about the ler language--he says it's derived from Chinese. I urged him to work on an idea he had considered --a collection of short ler stories, perhaps along the lines of a fable that was included in tWoD or tGoZ. There is clearly a lot of lerology that appears in none of the three published novels. The biography from the RoVaCon program book appears at the end of this message. I thought he had come out with a sequel to Waves, though, with a title something like Pressure Man. I don't recall it as being very good, which would explain its being omitted from the bio. Dan Hoey ----- Michael Anthony Foster from Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of DAW Books' leading SF authors. His first book, The Warriors of Dawn, billed on the back cover as a ``fine new novel'' and ``the debut of a great SF talent,'' appeared in 1975. The cover was designed by our own Frank Kelly Freas [sponsor of the RoVaCon Art Scholarship]. The novel was the first in a trilogy about genetically created supermen and superwomen, one of whom teams up with a normal human male against interstellar pirates. The next book was The Gameplayers of Zan, published in 1977 (a prequel to Warriors), and the third book was The Day of the Klesh, 1979. Foster's next book was Waves (1980), and in 1981 DAW brought out The Morphodite. Its sequel, The Transformer [probable typo--my copy omits the definite article], appeared in 1983. Hallucinations>, four short novels under one cover (only one of which is previously published) will appear in 1984. A work in progress is to be called Candastara, and will tentatively be out in 1985. M. A. Foster is a two-time nominee for the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer which is given annually by the World Science Fiction Convention. He is a former data systems analyst and was an ICBM launch crew commander in the U. S. Air Force. Since 1978 he has been employed as a salesman of welding supplies and industrial/medical gasses, and he is as involved currently with metallurgy as he was formerly with electronics and signal propagation. He is a semi-professional photographer, a novice bass guitarist, and also an articulate panelist at conventions here and elsewhere. M. A. Foster has already made his mark among the cadre of science fiction novelists, and we are proud to have him on the RoVaCon Advisory Board.