Beta Max

Melon. This random and powerful thought turns the sun into a massive honeydew melon, destroying the Earth and ruining Dr. Maximilian Tundra's day.In another even more unlikely universe, an alternative Max discovers the mining colony on Callisto has disappeared. Not only has his new home vanished, so has every shred of human civilization in the entire system!These two Maxes (and a few more) must discover the cause of this decoherence and save other universes – which are annoyingly infinite – from suffering the same fate.From the award-winning author Mark A. Rayner, Beta Max takes us on a profound and absurd voyage through an increasingly existential multiverse.Praise for the Tundraverse and Mark A. Rayner"Snarky as Pratchett, insightful as Stephenson, as full of scathing social commentary as Swift or Voltaire, and weirdly reminiscent of LeGuin … " ~Ernest Lilley, Amazing Stories"Rayner is brilliant! His writing is a strange and exhilarating mixture of the cerebral and the entertaining. He doesn't condescend to his readers, but blitzes us with ideas from an eclectic and diverse range of topics – metaphysical, physical, scientific, emotional, cultural, and random – and then trusts us to wrap our heads around all of it as we join his hero on a journey through the multiverse." ~Karen Molenaar Terrell, author of Cosmic Connections: Sharing the Joy Mark A. Rayner is an award-winning author, podcaster, and occasional professor who's not entirely convinced the universe isn't the hallucination of a cosmic AI. Rayner writes novels, short stories, plays, and the occasional bit of drivel (some as pure as fresh-fallen snow, some quite tainted with meaning). The Toronto Star described his work as "whimsical yet unsettling" and placed The Gates of Polished Horn, on its 2025 top twenty fiction reads. Much of his writing explores meaning and the nature of being through an existential tug of war between pathos and humor, compassion and narrative irony. He co-hosts Re-Creative, a podcast about the art that inspires creativity. Rayner does all of these things while being Canadian and serving his cats Churu treats on demand.You can read more of his fiction (for free) at his website where you can also dig into his irregular and explosive blog, The Skwib (markarayner.com). Follow him at Mastodon (https://mas.to/@markarayner).