The End of the Matter is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster is an American author of fantasy and science fiction. He currently resides in Prescott, Arizona, with his wife, and is also known for his novelizations of film scripts...

. The book is fourth chronologically in the Pip and Flinx

Flinx

Philip Lynx is a fictional character, an adventurous young man with unusual qualities in a series of books set in the "Humanx Commonwealth", written by Alan Dean Foster and published by Del Rey Books.-Character biography:...

 series.

Plot introduction

The novel takes place immediately after Orphan Star with Flinx taking his new space ship, Teacher built by the Ulru-Ujurrians, to Alaspin, the home planet of his minidrag Pip, in search of the man who bid on him when Flinx was a child in a slave auction.

Plot summary

He not only finds this man, Skua September, but also acquires a strange new alien pet Abalamahalamatandra—Ab for short—and is pursued by an assassin squad called the Qwarm. Flinx’s friends Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex show up looking for Ab in the hope of finding an ancient weapon, thought to possibly be capable of stopping a rogue black hole; before the three inhabited planets on the black hole's course are sucked in.

External links

• Alan Dean Foster homepage