The prize-winning science-fiction writer Roger Zelazny writes: "Philip José Farmer ... can be stark, dark, smoky, bright, and any color of the emotional spec- trum. He has a fascinating sense of the Sacred and the Profane. Put quite simply, he arouses awe. He has the talent and the skill to handle the sacred objects every writer must touch in order to convert the reader, in that timeless, spaceless place called Imagination." In A PRIVATE COSMOS, the third book about the World of Tiers, that other space-time continuum manufactured by THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES (Ace Book F- 367), Farmer takes up the adventures of the heroic rogue Kickaha. It takes place shortly after the astonishing events of THE GATES OF CREATION (Ace Book F-412), but is an unique science-fiction experience on its own. As Zelazny says in his introduction: