Talk:M. A. Foster

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It seems to me that tracing the origins of the Game of Zan, created by the Ler, to Conway's Game of Life is probably incorrect in detail, despite the fact that Zan does translate as Life and there are internal descriptions which recall Conway's invention. From internal evidence, it seems much more likely that the ultimate inspiration for the Ler Game was Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and many have seen Conway's game as an instantiation of the Hesse Game, since it is, in fact, a two-dimensional Turing Machine capable, as was Hesse's Game console, of describing the entire intellectual content of the universe. The books share many of Hesse's concerns, the tensions between individuality and cohesion for example, which Conway's game utterly ignore.

These themes, of extreme individuality, exemplified by the Ler, and group identity, the province of the humans, recur many times in the books, from the consoles of the Ler ship to the story-cubes of the Zlat humans, to the Protes, the same Game steadily devolving from technological elaboration to simplicity, from Hesse's (and Foster's) magnificent consoles, which seem modeled after organ consoles, to a contrivance of beads and wire that one might hold in one's hand, to the single "bead" of the encysted Prote, which we eventually discover represents either the zenith or the nadir of connectivity, the group "overmind" which can parasitize humanity and destroy individuality forever. Lee-Anne 03:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC)