Chaos Chronicles

The first installment in the thrilling, action-packed Chaos ChroniclesWhen John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules-indeed, sacrifice his life as he knows it-to prevent humanity's greatest cataclysm. Leaving friends and lover behind, hurtling across the solar system in a stolen spaceship, Bandicut can only pray that his actions will save the Earth-even if he doesn't live to see it again.

For John Bandicut, Earth is but a memory. Stranded at the edge of the galaxy in a structure populated with beings from a thousand worlds, Bandicut finds unexpected friends-only to be caught up in a cascade of forces that threaten the Shipworld itself. Confronting an entity known as the boojum, Bandicut discovers greater peril than ever in his journey into the unknown. Volume 2 of The Chaos Chronicles, from the Nebula-nominated author of Eternity's End. Narrated by the Grammy and Audie-winning Stefan Rudnicki.

INTO AN ALIEN SEA... John Bandicut and his company have been rewarded for their heroism in saving Shipworld. The prize: to be flung back into inhabited space-not to their home planets, as they had hoped, but to the bottom of an alien sea. Helpless and sinking, they are rescued by strange mer-creatures and brought to an undersea city, where a race of sea-people known as the Neri live in perpetual twilight. The Neri are well adapted to their world, but their survival is in jeopardy. They face danger from a warlike surface people called the landers, from a failure of their irreplaceable deep-sea factories, and from a terrifyingly powerful entity called the Maw, stirring to life in the abyss beneath their cities. Was the company brought here to help the Neri, as alien powers once came to the aid of Earth? What help could they, or perhaps their translator-stones, offer these imperiled sea-folk? For Bandicut, the discovery of the true nature of Maw of the Abyss is the beginning-but only the beginning-of an answer. This undersea chapter of the immensely popular Chaos Chronicles is not to be missed! Another interstellar adventure from a master of the craft, Jeffrey A. Carver.

Stars are dying. John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars-and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid of Deep and Dark, sentient clouds and perhaps the strangest beings they have met in their exceedingly strange journey, there may be hope. Back on Triton, Julie Stone-briefly Bandicut's lover before he was transported away to a new life at the edge of the galaxy-encounters the enigmatic translator, the alien entity that first drew Bandicut into his extraordinary adventures. Julie must face her own life-or-death decision in defense of the Earth-while for Bandicut and company, whatever chance they have of stopping the terrifying Mindaru will be found only in the fiery heart of an intelligent sun. Sunborn continues the harrowing journey through the tumultuous worlds of The Chaos Chronicles, from the Nebula-nominated author of Eternity's End.

The starstream is beautiful. But beauty turns deadly when an ancient AI bent on destruction uses it to travel uptime, to humanity's future. The Mindaru are dead. Or so exiled-Earthman John Bandicut and his alien companions believe, after their intervention to save the Orion Nebula and surrounding worlds. But now a part of this ancient and malicious AI colony is swarming toward the present from its birthplace deep in the past. Their opening: a temporal disturbance in the starstream, a hyperspatial thoroughfare used by myriad civilizations. The disturbance emanates from the planetary defenses of nearby Karellia, whose people know nothing of the starstream or the galaxy-threatening Mindaru. Only Bandicut and his friends have the knowledge and experience to act. But several of Bandicut's company have gone missing. Bandicut and Li-Jared must team with the pandimensional Ruall and her gokat-the oddest aliens Bandicut has met since the shadow-people-and journey to Karellia to find a way to cut off the timestream. Separated from the others, Ik meets another human of Earth-a former lover of Bandicut's-and embarks with her on a perilous mission far back into deep time, seeking a way to stop the Mindaru at their source. The Chaos Chronicles returns at last in The Reefs of Time, part one of a heartstopping, two-part adventure. Concluded in Crucible of Time, from the Nebula-nominated author of Eternity's End.

A galaxy in peril ... The story begun in The Reefs of Time continues. The time-tides caused by Karellia's defenses have brought the malicious Mindaru AI out of the deep past into the present, threatening Bandicut and Li-Jared, who have arrived at the backwater planet-Li-Jared's homeworld-to find it on the brink of interplanetary war. Somehow they must forge a peace between Karellia and its neighboring world if the Mindaru threat is to be broken. Back on Shipworld, Ik and Julie Stone risk their lives a second time to stop the Mindaru at their source: a planet near the galactic core, a billion years in the past. Can Antares, the beautiful humanoid who also loves Bandicut, help them? What of Bria the gokat? And Amaduse, the most influential librarian in Shipworld? And in the deep time of the galaxy's early history, by the light of a million suns, the Mindaru do hideous things to an innocent species. The Mindaru plan for the altered creatures bears momentous possibilities even the deadly AI cannot predict. Time is critical. Time is elastic. And time is running out.