According to an industry source, the book is set in America, and runs from the 1960s to the near future. The protagonist is a man named Chandler Forrest whose participation in LSD experiments administered by the C.I.A. has given him superpowers.

Richard Abate, who works out of the New York office of the talent agency Endeavor, sold world rights to editor Sean Desmond on the basis of 25 pages of material and what was described as a video trailer that editors had to log on to a Web site to see.

Crown is a unit of Random House.

UPDATE: Richard Abate just called to say that the trilogy, which we identified as a "sci-fi/alternative-history trilogy" based on what someone who'd seen the proposal told us, is only going to have a little bit of sci-fi in it. Mostly alternative history, in other words.

Mr. Beschloss' last book for Simon & Schuster was edited by Michael Korda, who has since retired. Before that, he worked with Alice Mayhew. At Crown, sources said, he will be edited by Sean Desmond.

Mr. Beschloss is the fifth bestselling writer who has recently left Simon & Schuster's formidable stable of non-fiction authors: Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, has gone over to Little, Brown; Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, is now working with Tim Duggan at HarperCollins; James B. Stewart, author of Den of Thieves, is at The Penguin Press; and New York Times columnist David Brooks moved to Random House.

Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg dismissed the notion that those departures were an indication of a larger trend, arguing that it in modern publishing, authors routinely move from house to house.

"That's the marketplace at work," Mr. Rothberg said. "We make bestselling authors here. Success attracts attention. There's a whole marketplace of publishers out there who notice the success. They want bestselling authors on their list, and frequently they're willing to pay a 'free agent premium' to attract those authors."

Mr. Rothberg noted that Simon & Schuster has recently renewed existing contracts with Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Peter Galbraith, and Walter Isaacson, and brought in new authors like Richard Engel, Zachary Karabell, Robert Mnookin, Romesh Ratnesar, Philip Pan, and Richard Schlesinger.

A spokesperson for Crown did not respond to requests for comment.