Line #22 Literature/WorldOfTiers


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tiers.jpg]]
2	''World of Tiers'' is a series of ScienceFiction novels by Creator/PhilipJoseFarmer who sends his protagonist into a multiverse of artificially constructed worlds revealing our world is not what it seems.
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4	An old man named Robert Wolff, looking at buying a house, hears a horn coming from an empty closet he had just inspected. He opens it and finds a portal to another world. A man inside throws him a strange horn before the portal closes. The old man hides the horn, then sneaks back in at night to get it. He opens up the portal and ends up in a bizarre place - a flat world with five tiers, stacked like a step pyramid, with mountainous cliffs connecting them.
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6	He finds out that this world was created by one of the Lords (Thoans), a group of beings with fantastic technologies that keep them immortal. The lowest tier is populated by Greek-descended humans and monsters; Wolff falls in love with a nymph named Chryseis. When she is abducted by the Lord of this world, he must climb up to the top to rescue her.
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8	And that's just the first book. Later books take on the Lords' worst enemy, the Black Bellers, and travel to multiple other universes created by other Lords.
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10	There are six books in the series, plus one related book:
11	* ''The Maker of Universes''
12	* ''The Gates of Creation''
13	* ''A Private Cosmos''
14	* ''Behind the Walls of Terra''
15	* ''The Lavalite World''
16	* ''More Than Fire''
17	* ''Red Orc's Rage'' (which uses the World of Tiers as a fictional element within the story but doesn't involve the main characters from the other books).
18	----
19	!!This series provides examples of:
20	* AIIsACrapshoot: Black Bellers — sentient minds that "grew up" in storage devices for consciousness transplantation.
21	* AncientArtifact: Effectively, all old technological devices, since surviving Thoans usually can't make more. The Horn of Shambarimen is particularly notable, being unique and extremely useful — it can open a portal in place of any inactive teleportation device.
22	* AmnesiacGod: As revealed at the end of the first book, [[spoiler:Robert Wolff is Lord Jadawin, but lost his memories after being defeated by another lord and being stranded on Earth.]]
23	%%* AuthorAvatar: Paul Janus Finnegan (note the initials).%%Is an example how?
24	* ChangingOfTheGuard: The protagonist shifts in the third book, going from Robert Wolff to Kickaha.
25	%%* CoolGate: Inter-dimensional machines/gates.
26	* DimensionalTraveler: Paul Janus Finnegan (AKA Kickaha the Trickster) and Robert Wolff spend much of the novels traveling through artificially created universes.
27	%%* EvilRedhead: Red Orc.
28	* GrandTheftMe: Black Bellers are capable of taking over the bodies of human hosts.
29	* ImColdSoCold: Last words of a Drachelander (German-descended) knight in the first book, after he was swarmed by enemies and the protagonist arrived just too late to save him: "'''siz kalt''."
30	* InterdimensionalTravelDevice: People can travel between the artificial universes of the setting by using gates. Gates can be activated by various means, including tokens and playing music on a special horn.
31	* HealingFactor: All Thoans and some dwellers of the pocket universes able to regenerate lost and damaged body parts.
32	* MonsterInTheMoat: A castle in the Dracheland tier is described as having a river dragon living in its moat.
33	* PortalCut: One of the many interdimensional teleport gates is a trap that dismembers by severing the connection and the intruder.
34	* PortalNetwork: Portals can be used to connect between worlds. A common portal design is two crescent moons, touching at the tips.
35	* RecursivePrecursors: In ''Behind the Walls of Terra'', [[spoiler:the Thoan home universe itself is stated to have been created by another, unknown race]].
36	* RedPillBluePill: An aging man with a failed life and a shrewish wife is in the basement of a tract house he is buying when a door between the worlds opens up. He can stay with his living-death retirement or leap into the utter unknown. Soul-killing safety vs death-or-glory.
37	* SignificantMonogram: Paul Janus Finnegan's initials are the same as Phillip José Farmer's. This is something of a recurring easter egg in Farmer's works.
38	* SwapTeleportation: Swapping teleporters co-exist with portals, and the swapping is explained early on. Usually, the swapped volume is a cylinder wide and high enough to fit a single human, or several.
39	* VillainousIncest: Incest is perfectly acceptable among the Lords and Ladies of the pocket.
40	* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: The eventual fate of [[spoiler:Robert Wolff/Lord Jadawin and Chryseis]] is never revealed after their disappearance in ''A Private Cosmos''.
41	* WorldShapes: The World of Tiers takes the form of a world-sized Tower of Babel, just that the continent-sized layers (tiers) are way wider than they are tall. And the top layer has the Lord's palace on it.
42	%%* YearInsideHourOutside: Time in the pocket universes moves quite differently indeed.%%How so?

Context Literature / WorldOfTiers