The protagonist Bradley Clifford is a scientist drafted into military research for the American government.

Finding the establishment repressive, he leaves and forms a team to develop his methods to create a means of controlling gravity.

They reluctantly agree to use their methods to create a new and devastating super weapon, though Clifford's ultimate product, while indeed being capable of producing a devastating quantity of energy, is designed with a less mercenary ambition: to give humanity the stars and permanently prevent the use of the new super weapons.

John Clute characterised the book as playing to Hogan's strengths, in particular "his hard-edged sense of how scientists think.

"[2] Kirkus Reviews was mixed in its reception, complaining that "[t]he style often suffers from ... tone-deafness, and the political analysis is not penetrating enough to support all the noises of moral outrage" but concluded that "Hogan succeeds where so many science-fiction writers fail: in creating and skillfully developing a scientific premise with enough teeth in it to be a source of pleasure rather than embarrassment.