Robert Charles Wilson's science-fiction novel, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and a Hugo nominee, begins in early-twenty-first-century Thailand, where Scott Warden, an American expatriate and aimless software veteran, inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the sudden, violent appearance of a towering stone monument in the forest. The pillar flattens trees for a quarter mile, freezes ice out of the humid air, and emits a burst of radiation—and its inscription commemorates a military victory that will not occur for another sixteen years. Soon a second, larger monolith obliterates the center of Bangkok, killing thousands, and over the following years more of these "chronoliths" arrive from the future around the globe, each marking the conquests of a warlord named Kuin whom no one has yet met. As human society is destabilized by these arrivals—by the fear, fatalism, and opportunism they breed—Scott is drawn repeatedly and inexplicably back toward the phenomenon and the scientists trying to understand it, caught in a loop of causality that seems to implicate him personally in the future the monoliths foretell. Wilson uses the central puzzle to explore questions of determinism and free will, self-fulfilling prophecy, and how societies behave when the future seems already written: does knowing that Kuin will win help bring his victory about? Threaded through the large-scale speculation is an intimate story of Scott's fractured family and his effort to rebuild an ordinary life against the pull of history. Intelligent and character-driven, The Chronoliths is a meditation on time, fate, and human agency disguised as a tautly plotted thriller.