Tower at the Edge of Time
Reviewed date: 2026 Jul 29
Rating: 1
140 pages
This is the worst book I've read all year.
It's an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, except instead of placing the story in Africa or on the planet Mars, Lin Carter chooses the entire galaxy and the whole of Time as the settings.
Thane of the Two Swords
Our hero is Thane of the Two Swords, who we meet as he's approached by Prince Chan of Shimar and his dwarf servant Druu of Yoth Zembis. Chan offers Thane a hundred million gold pieces for three days of service. Thane insults Chan and leaves.
Immediately afterward, Thane runs into a beautiful woman on the run from five Desert Warriors who are chasing her with swords. Thane fights them off, then escapes with the woman--whose name is Illara--away from the city. Unfortunately, they are both caught by the forces of Shastar of the Red Moon. Shastar imprisons them aboard his warship. We find out right away that Shastar and Chan are working together. They need Thane because they believe he stole the Jewel of Amzar from the temple of the Time Priests of Aealim on Mnom the Dark World. They need the Time Jewel to open the Web of Time and lead them to the Tower Beyond Time so they can steal the treasure it contains. If all this sounds incredibly dumb, trust me, it is.
Illara is working with Shastar, and she tries to pump Thane for information (but of course she falls in love with Thane at the end of the book.)
Thane: psionic superhero
Shastar sentences Thane to fight a duel with Zangor, a Nexian Mind-Gladiator. Thane is almost destroyed by the mental blows that Zangor throws at him, but the mental blows shake something loose in Thane's mind and unlock heretofore unknown mental powers. Thane lifts Zangor into the air using the power of his mind, holds him aloft, then drops him to his death.
Cool. So our hero has psionic powers of psychokinesis now.
Thane is put into a very regular sort of prison cell on Shastar's jungle moon hideout. You know the sort: heavy stone walls with a tiny window barred by a grill of massive steel rods. Thane uses his new mental powers to simply realign the atoms of the steel, then rips the grill away with his bare hands. Then Thane uses his psionic psychokinesis on himself, to levitate himself through the air to the cell where Illara is being kept prisoner. He mind-punches a hole through the steel bars on her window. Then he flies them both to Shastar's little moored spaceboat, which they steal.
Thane: immortal god
Thane reveals to Illara that he didn't steal the Jewel of Amzar. He was trying to steal it when he dropped it. It shattered, and the spirit that was inside the Jewel entered him. The spirit of the last Immortal, a very god. That's what has been giving Thane these new mental powers--he has a god living inside him.
Illara double-crosses him. She activates an immobilizer that blocks Thane's psionic powers, then she sells him out to Chan, Druu, and Shastar.
The five of them--Prince Chan, his dwarf servant Druu, Shastar of the Red Moon, Thane, and Illara journey to Mnom the Dark World where they enter the Temple of the Time Web. There they turn off the mental immobilizer and Thane uses his psionic powers to active the Time Web.
Rage: purple prose
And here begins the most ludicrously and rage-inducing sequence in the book.
First, we get an entire chapter that is just the traveling through time. They see all of history unfolding. It's an entire chapter of paragraphs like this:
Before their dazed and astonished eyes, Torje and the Star Crusaders carried forward the starburst banners of Valdamar in savage struggles against the Machine Kings of Atrogon the Robot Planet... and the Sky Lords of Bartosca, who enslaved the Tigermen with their will-destroying death drug--watched as they battled the dread science of the Sun-Stealers of Arlomma the Ice Planet, and fought against the Mind Masters of Pelizon
Just pages and pages of that.
Rage, rage: the treasure
Then they arrive at the end of time. They find The Last Planet, and on it, the Tower Beyond Time where the Immortals stored their vast treasures. And here Lin Carter gives us pages and pages of description of treasure, like this:
Coins of a thousand ancient realms on a hundred million worlds. Coins of gold, silver, platinum, bronze, nickel, chaya, iridium, and the precious metals of many planets. Coins of bronze and silver from luxurious Sybaris and Iberia, and glittering Syracuse where wise Archimedes measured the earth; gold staters incised with the profiles of Seleucid and Antiochan monarchs with ivy-wreathed brows
Again, this goes on for pages.
Greedy Prince Chan is transfixed at the sight of all the treasure. His dwarf servant Druu chooses this moment to exact revenge against his cruel master: he stabs Chan in the back. Chan lives just long enough to kill Druu with a laser pistol, then he dies.
Rage, rage, RAGE!: the real treasure
And now the most acutely rage-inducing bit of this entire rage-inducing sequence:
[The] heaped mounds of treasure, for which they had come so far…vanished!
Yes, the treasure disappears. Then a disembodied voice explains that there was no treasure, and that the real treasure is the friends they made along the way.
The end.
This book is no treasure either.