The Lord of Time

Read the opening

Before there was any time to keep, there was no time at all, and before there was any light to measure, there was no light. This is the first thing to understand about the place where this story begins: it was not dark. Darkness needs something to fail to reach. What filled that country was simply the absence of arrival, a silence so complete that nothing in it could be called a distance, because distance is what separates two things, and there was nothing yet to be separated. Into that absence, very slowly, came two energy sources. Neither of them was alive. Neither had been a sun for a very long time. Each had been a star once, a body of hydrogen and helium so large that it burned for a few million years, then ran out, then did something no ordinary fire can do: it collapsed under its own weight until its matter was packed tighter than an atom’s nucleus, and its

The sample pages on this site continue the opening — and the full book is available in print.