The Time of the Transference

Alan Dean Foster

Aug 2013 · Spellsinger Book 6 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

There's no place like home...

It was a pretty good life for a spellsinger from L.A. He'd battled demons, fought deadly Plated Folk, even met a socialist dragon and survived. Now Jon-Tom was quite happy to settle into domestic bliss with the fiery Talea, study magic, and practice spellsinging on his duar. But the magic instrument is broken when Jon-Tom protects the wizard Clothahump from thieves and he must set out across the Glittergeist Sea to find the one person who can fix it. With the irrepressible Mudge the Otter as a travelling companion, only the unexpected can happen. But cannibal muskrats, ogres, and a fierce pirate king parrot must seem ordinary indeed when Jon-Tom finds a way back to Earth - and he must choose which world is home.

Ratings and reviews

Bought a hard copy of this book but for some reason really felt the need to review it somewhere. It's meant to be some kind of sci-fi fantasy thing but it just doesn't cut the mustard when the whole thing is focussed on a single human male character living on a world of talking animals (average earthly animals - birds, hedgehogs, owls, etc). More like a Disney movie setting. Sort of a lazy attempt at 'creating' a world, in my opinion. I don't feel compelled to finish the book.

I have read and then re read every book every five years or so because I enjoyed them so much I'm now 45 and still enjoy losing myself in this fantasy world... Brilliant

About the author

Alan Dean Foster (1946 - )
Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles. After receiving Bachelor's and Master's degrees at UCLA, he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, California PR firm. His writing career began in 1968 when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster's and published it as a short story. More sales of short fiction followed. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was published by Ballantine Books in 1972. Since then, Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all major science fiction magazines and anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. Five collections of his short work have been published. Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving. He has also novelized Star Wars movies as well as such well-known films as Alien and its two sequels. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first Star Trek movie. His work has won numerous awards. He and his wife, Jo Ann Oxley, have traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. His other pastimes include music, basketball, hiking, body surfing, scuba diving, collecting animation on video, karate and weightlifting.

For more information see www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/foster_alan_dean