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A science fiction thriller from the author of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

‘A fine engrossing novel by a master!’ Philadelphia Enquirer

In a time when America’s power has been eroded by energy depletion, and world control has been virtually given over to the Chinese, only one man has the courage to seek new mineral resources among the stars. He is Ben Belson, one of the richest men in the world, a man haunted by the memory of a loveless childhood and driven by needs and desires he can barely understand or control. His dream is to find the means to help America break the stranglehold of the corrupt interests who are keeping it a second class power.

Mike Jerome, a likeable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses – and thus create time travel.

On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979 – ten years in the future. This is but the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is himself living the time change himself! At the end of each stop he tries to find his best friend, Pete Jones, a Negro jazz musician. Jumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take Mike into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps, for a rousing series of adventures in all sorts of bizarre circumstances. At the very end of this outstanding science fiction adventure by a noted father-son team, there is a slyly ambiguous twist which leaves the reader wondering…

Jay Vickers was an ordinary man, or so he thought. All he wanted was to be left in peace to finish his next book. However, strange things started happenin – from his discovery of a mouse that was not a mouse, to the visit of an old neighbor that was not a man. Or at least he was not an ordinary man.

For as it turned out, neither was Jay Vickers. This is the story of human mutation – the next step in the evolution of the species. What if mutants walked among us already? What if they were organized? What if they had unbelievable powers, such as the ability to cross between alternate worlds or dimensions at will, or to intuitively reach the absolutely correct answer by intuition or “hunch”, or to telepathically reach out to the stars?

Such supermen would automatically try to conquer lesser men, would they not? Or would they do everything in their power to free the rest of humanity from slavery and suffering? Just what would the political and corporate powers-that-be do to keep their power and their slaves? How would mutants undermine the power of these bosses to set mankind free?

This is a story of unlimited freedom, of worlds without end, ready for the taking. It is also the story of powerful, benevolent beings that exist only to help those who need that help. This is a future of a lop-sided mechanical culture of technology that could provide creature comfort for a few, but not human justice or security for the many. It is a future of hate, and war, and worry. Nothing like the way the world really turned out – after all, there couldn’t really be an underground of mutants working to free humanity . . . could there?

In medical student August Seebeck’s world, almost identical to ours, there are eleven months in a year. None of them is the month of August-until now, when the young orphan stumbles into the true, infinite universe, and becomes a Player in the Game of Worlds. And step by deranged step he meets his siblings: Avril, Decius, Jan, Jules, Maybelline, Septimus/Septima who is both male and female, Toby, the others. And outside his family, glorious, brilliant Lune, also a Player, is quickly his lover, with dreadful secrets of her own.


These diverse warriors of the multiverse confront the terrible K-machines, who detest and slaughter humans… but then are the Seebeck family really human? What are these silver symbols engraved into their flesh? What is the true nature of the unending, unfolding cosmos, a meta-reality built from ontological computation, Lune’s doctoral specialty? And how can August slay the looming Jabberwock using only the Sun-blazing Vorpal implant in his hand? What final transformation awaits the multiverse at Yggdrasil Station, at the death and dawn of spacetime, where all the heroes die and live again? In this astounding helter-skelter two-part novel, the answers to such questions emerge along a twisting path that will not set you free until you sit with August at a great thirteen-sided table and learn his destiny, and perhaps your own.