Mode

About the Mode series

Colene, a suicidal teenage girl from Earth, discovers a portal into Proton/Phaze, the paired science-fiction-and-fantasy world at the center of Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series, and falls in love with Darius, a man trapped between realities. Anthony spins this connection into a new four-book arc that pushes the underlying premise of Apprentice Adept even further: rather than two linked worlds, the Mode series proposes an entire structure of alternate realities — 'modes' — each governed by different physical or magical laws, which Colene and Darius must navigate to find a way to be together and to solve the crises threatening the worlds they pass through.

Where Apprentice Adept alternated cleanly between its two paired settings, Mode widens the scope considerably, introducing new realities with their own internally consistent rules each book, while keeping Colene's personal arc — her recovery from suicidal depression and self-harm, treated with unusual directness for the genre — as the emotional throughline connecting the more expansive world-hopping plot. It functions as a loose sequel series to Apprentice Adept, expanding that series' central conceit rather than continuing its original cast's story directly.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Virtual Mode. The four books follow Colene and Darius's relationship and their journey through a widening set of alternate realities, with each volume building directly on where the previous one left off.

This series connects to Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series (set in the same Proton/Phaze universe) but can be read independently — familiarity with Apprentice Adept adds context but isn't required to follow Colene and Darius's story.