World at the End of Time is a 1990 hard science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl. It tells the parallel stories of a human and a plasma-based intelligence who manage to survive to the time near the heat death of the universe. The book is thus a combined work in speculative cosmology and space colonization. Plot summary World at the End of Time follows the story of a young Earth-born human, Viktor Sorricaine, on a colony expedition to a distant star system. The colonists are frozen for the long trip between stars. Unknown to both the humans of Earth and the colonists, the stars around them are home to immensely long-lived (effectively immortal) plasma creatures—with no knowledge of, or interest in, the activities of insignificant matter creatures. Wan-To, one of the oldest and most powerful plasma creatures, is engaged in a war. After creating modified copies of himself, or "children", for company, Wan-To finds himself in a deadly game of chess with them. The "board" is the entire galaxy and the weapons are the stars themselves. Each star may be home to an enemy "child"; using a variety of exotic particles, Wan-To is able to cause a targeted star to flare and kill any enemy that may be living within it. Some time after the colonists have left Earth, its own sun falls victim to the war, being made to explode with humanity on Earth being destroyed as collateral damage. The colonists are thus the only humans left. Into the middle of this battlefield, the three colony ships (Ark, New Mayflower and Argosy) unwittingly head for their new home. Upon arriving, the colony begins to establish itself ... only to discover that their entire local group of stars appears to be undergoing a bizarre acceleration, and are dimming. After a disastrous disease outbreak and terraforming failures, the desperate colonists eventually decide to investigate the strange radiation emissions from a small world within their solar system. Upon arriving in orbit, their ship is badly damaged and Viktor is forced into the onboard freezer systems. They are eventually rescued and unfrozen four hundred of the colony's years later, to find the colony in an even more desperate situation. The star around which the colony's world orbits has dimmed considerably (owing to the energy being siphoned off to accelerate it) and they are now travelling so fast that, because of relativistic