Still Forms on Foxfield

When Commensals finish their life span, they go to the jungle, to a mysterious structure known as the Dwelling, to add their body and mind to the collective consciousness, the One.

Allison Thorne, a widow with a twelve-year-old son, David, who is in charge of the main settlement's technical center, is the one contacted by the Earth dwellers, United Nations Interplanetary.

Aspects of UNI culture, such as majority voting and violent space games in which people are killed, shock the Foxfielders.

A final chapter, set some months later, shows Foxfield slowly integrating into UNI society while insisting on maintaining its own identity.

"[1] James Nicoll, writing in 2015, noted that — aside from assumptions about the inevitability of nuclear war and the long-term historical relevance of Richard Nixon — the book "has not aged anywhere nearly as badly as it could have", particularly commending Slonczewski's depiction of "a world with ubiquitous networked communication", at which she "succeeds to a greater degree than many of her contemporaries did.