What happens to the once and future creatures who escaped the death of Planet Ulro and embarked on a generational star-ship to find a new home in the galaxy? Ishmael Kahn, historian and a nineth-generation survivor, tells the story of problematic collective life on this sacred and profane time machine. Two and a half centuries after its launch; anxiety, boredom, and despair provide clues to an unrealized vision of human being. The tensions of everyday life in space feed competition between an authoritarian Starship Command and a stubborn political resistance in the Council of Elders. When an inhabitable planet is discovered, the strife between "bare life" and the "good life" erupts into a cloak-and-dagger struggle for the soul of a new colony.

This second volume of The Galatea Saga is a prequel to In the Hollow of Time-History of a Dying Planet is prequel to this tale. Read in any sequence, the effect is to contract future and past into the present moment of reading.