What happens to the once and future creatures who escaped the death of Planet Ulro and embarked on a generational starship to find a new home in the galaxy? Ishmael Kahn, historian and a ninth-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.