[1] The novel follows the adventures of Conrad Metcalf, a tough, smart-alecky private detective, through a futuristic version of San Francisco and Oakland, California.

Metcalf quickly discovers that nobody wants the case solved: not the victim's ex-wife, not the police, and certainly not the gun-toting kangaroo who works for the local mafia boss.

Animals, too, can be given the intelligence of a human being through bioscientific techniques, a concept explored previously by David Brin in his Uplift novels, Roger Zelazny in The Dream Master, and in Olaf Stapledon's Sirius.

For an unexplained reason, psychology is no longer viewed as a science, and psychologists behave like Jehovah's Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other itinerant proselytizing religions.

But substance abuse still exists in this future- there is a lucrative black market in blanketrol, an earlier version of forgettol and addictol, but highly addictive nevertheless.

However, unscrupulous criminal elements in this society have developed "slaveboxes", neural implants which activate the inert central nervous systems of the sleepers, using their bodies for prostitution or slave labour while unconscious.

After six years, he is thawed out, only to find that memory retention has become a social taboo, and people now have prompters installed to provide retrospective commentary about past events in their lives.