The main story is about a man named Ted Benteley who lives in a strange world, dominated by percentages and the lottery.

Solar Lottery takes place in a world dominated by logic and numbers, and loosely based on a numerical military strategy employed by US and Soviet intelligence called minimax (part of game theory).

Reese has just been forced out of office, however, and Benteley gets tricked into swearing an unbreakable oath of personal fealty to the former world leader.

A second plotline concerns a team of Leon Cartwright's followers travelling to the far reaches of the solar system in search of a mysterious cult figure named John Preston, who, 150 years after his disappearance, is thought to somehow be alive on the legendary tenth planet known as the "Flame Disc".

In the meantime, however, the book had been sold to a publisher in the UK, where it appeared as World of Chance: this version includes the cut passages.

Declaring that Dick had created "a strange and highly convincing and self-consistent future society," he faulted Solar Lottery only for "a tendency, in both its nicely contrasted plots, to dwindle away at the end".