Search Worlds Without End

A young man's odyssey of self discovery in a world eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar. Set thirteen centuries in the future, A. A. Attanasio meticulously creates a brilliantly realized Earth, rich in detail and filled with beings brought to life with intense energy. In this strange and beautiful world, Sumner Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like powers and in the process take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch -- and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time's last world, the strangest of all -- the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live -- and love -- at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture -- until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth -- 130 billion years earlier -- where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he's come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

The Arc - Earth's last hope? The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth—and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity's survival

Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zotl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.

The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet humans choose sides, as humans will, participating in the titanic struggle between Rimstalker and zotl in ways strange and momentous.

Set in the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror, which is no more and no less than a vast cosmic machine, The Last Legends of Earth is a love story, a gripping saga of struggle against alien control, and an examination of the machinery of creation and destruction.