Maker of Universes

Robert Wolf, a 66-year-old doctor of philosophy, after retiring inspected the house he planned to buy—when, all at once, a window opened in a wall closet to another universe. A young man who called himself Kikaha tossed him an unusual horn. That same night, obeying an unexpected decision, Wolf—using the horn through the same window—sent himself to another world.

It wasn’t a random choice…

After some time of tranquil life on the shores of Oceanos, he turned into a strong 25-year-old man. But this amazing world—essentially one huge multi-tiered mountain—didn’t let our hero relax for long. Circumstances forced him to leave the coast and set off on a long and deadly trek to the top of this world. To the place where, according to his companions, the Lord Himself—the creator of this universe—lives in an impregnable castle.

Farmer’s series about the Multi-tiered World—“pocket universes,” parallel worlds in which their unknown creators play—present a technology that, by earthly standards, seems “divine.”

The Rulers are the last representatives of an ancient race that, during its heyday, created a little more than a thousand universes. Small ones, of course—just a bit larger than our Solar System. But arranged to the owner’s taste. For some, change is what they like—and a world appears where, in a single day, a mountain can become a plain, and neighboring hills may be a thousand kilometers apart. For others, stability is more appealing—and a world appears built like a child’s pyramid. And for someone else, natural evolution is the favorite—and a Earth appears, created in full accordance with the biblical myth from several thousand years ago, as it would have become through billions of years of natural development.

So don’t send starships, lest they smash into walls lined with drawn galaxies—just as the Rulers’ spacecraft once ran into them. Because the Rulers, too, come from a pocket world made by unknown ancestors who left no exit from it…