Like much of Niven's work, the story is heavily influenced by the setting: a gas torus, a ring of air around a neutron star.

The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits the star just outside its Roche limit.

The Smoke Ring was colonized 500 years prior to the beginning of the story by a crew of 20 astronauts.

Kendy, the recorded personality of a citizen of "The State" who exists in the computer of the original space-ship that colonized the Smoke Ring, has become impatient.

Kendy manipulates a group into making contact with "The Admiralty", a neighboring civilization at Gold's L4 Lagrange Point (which they refer to as "the Clump").

One of the drivers for the story follows the latest operator of "the silver suit", the Citizen's Tree's working spacesuit.

The job goes to the occasionally born "dwarves" who tend to develop into humans of Earth-normal height and build.

The chain of events that led to the colonization of the Smoke Ring through a "mutiny" on the ship is explored.

It is, however, a "hard" science fiction novel, and it has the weakness endemic to that genre – the individual characters are never satisfyingly drawn, so that the reader is somewhat distanced from them.

"[2] The Library Journal said in 1987 that "the alien topography of this sequel to The Integral Trees serves as a fascinating contrast to the persistence of humanity's adventuring spirit".