The Hour of the Gate

by Alan Dean Foster

Published 1 February 1984
Marooned in another universe, a young American musician leads a motley army in battle against an enemy that threatens to destroy their world and ours Jon-Tom just wanted to go home. Trapped in a world where animals speak and magic is real, the American college student yearned for an ordinary dorm-room life. But here his music has magical power-even if he can't control it-which may be able to save the world from the army of the Plated Folk, whose sinister queen plans on killing and eating every warm-blooded mammal she can get her pincers on and taking over their lands. The great battle is coming, and Jon-Tom, whose posse includes a wizarding turtle, a cowardly bat, and an otter with a filthy mind, must raise an army to fight it. To find allies they must make an impossible journey, across mountains and rivers no one has ever passed before. Survival will be a miracle-but Jon-Tom is no ordinary musician. "One of the most consistently inventive and fertile writers of science fiction and fantasy." -The Times "Alan Dean Foster is a master of creating alien worlds." -SFRevu "Foster knows how to spin a yarn." -Starlog "Foster does a fine job with his misfit heroes and even with his minor characters." -Publishers Weekly The New York Times-bestselling author of more than 110 books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction and fantasy. Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, but first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. In 1972 he wrote his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, the first in his Pip and Flinx series featuring the Humanx Commonwealth, a universe he has explored in more than twenty-five novels. Foster also created the Spellsinger series and has written dozens of bestselling film novelizations, as well as the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An avid world traveler, he chronicles some of his own adventures in the wild in his memoir Predators I Have Known (2011). Foster lives with his family in Prescott, Arizona.


To save his dying mentor, Jon-Tom the spellsinger and his ever reluctant sidekick Mudge the otter must venture across time and space to confront a danger unlike anything they have faced before Jon-Tom and his friends have seen better days. After his motley crew moved heaven and Earth to save civilization at the battle of Jo-Troom Gate, his merry band went its separate ways. Mudge, the foul-mouthed otter, eagerly returned to thieving, drinking, and whoring, while Talea, the girl of Jon-Tom's dreams, embarked on her own adventures, leaving him to study magic with Clothahump, the irascible wizard whose inept spell trapped him in this weird otherworld in the first place. But now Clothahump is dying, and not even Jon-Tom's spellsinging can make him well. In search of medicine for the centuries-old turtle, he and Mudge venture across the seas on a dubious quest that will require the assistance of an Amazonian white tiger, a ferret, and a gender-challenged unicorn. They're going to need all the help they can get. "One of the most consistently inventive and fertile writers of science fiction and fantasy."-The Times "Alan Dean Foster is a master of creating alien worlds." -SFRevu "Foster knows how to spin a yarn." -Starlog "Foster does a fine job with his misfit heroes and even with his minor characters." -Publishers Weekly The New York Times-bestselling author of more than 110 books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction and fantasy. Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, but first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. In 1972 he wrote his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, the first in his Pip and Flinx series featuring the Humanx Commonwealth, a universe he has explored in more than twenty-five novels. Foster also created the Spellsinger series and has written dozens of bestselling film novelizations, as well as the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An avid world traveler, he chronicles some of his own adventures in the wild in his memoir Predators I Have Known (2011). Foster lives with his family in Prescott, Arizona.

Spellsinger

by Alan Dean Foster

Published 1 June 1983
Snatched through a portal into a land of magic, a young musician must use a mysterious, multistring duar to rescue the world into which he has fallen before he can return to his own Jonathan Thomas Meriweather is a typical college student, interested in girls, music, and an occasional taste of reefer. But when a journey through an interdimensional portal lands him in a world of talking animals and ominous sorcery, he finds he is on a very different trip indeed. Here, when he plays a strange instrument called a duar, peculiar things happen-powerful magic that may be the only way to stop a dark force that threatens his new world-and his old one. Reluctantly, he finds himself teaming up with a semi-senile turtle wizard; a thieving, backstabbing otter; and a bewildered Marxist dragon to rally an army for the war about to come. Spellsinger, the first in Alan Dean Foster's eight-book Spellsinger series, introduces a world of magic and mayhem, where animals are people and plunging ahead no matter what the consequences may be the only way to survive. "One of the most consistently inventive and fertile writers of science fiction and fantasy." -The Times "Alan Dean Foster is a master of creating alien worlds." -SFRevu "Foster knows how to spin a yarn." -Starlog "Foster does a fine job with his misfit heroes and even with his minor characters." -Publishers Weekly The New York Times-bestselling author of more than 110 books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction and fantasy. Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, but first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. In 1972 he wrote his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, the first in his Pip and Flinx series featuring the Humanx Commonwealth, a universe he has explored in more than twenty-five novels. Foster also created the Spellsinger series and has written dozens of bestselling film novelizations, as well as the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An avid world traveler, he chronicles some of his own adventures in the wild in his memoir Predators I Have Known (2011). Foster lives with his family in Prescott, Arizona.

Midworld

by Alan Dean Foster

Published 1 January 1975