The book includes a prologue and Martin's S'uthlam storyline (published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact), adding them as bridging material, and gathering them with other Tuf stories into one episodic novel.

[1] The novel concerns the (mis)adventures of Haviland Tuf, an exceptionally tall, bald, very pale, overweight, phlegmatic, vegetarian, cat-loving-but-otherwise solitary space trader.

Tuf inadvertently becomes the master of the Ark, an ancient, 30-kilometre-long (19 mi) "seedship" – a very powerful warship with advanced ecological engineering capabilities – after a deal between several of his venal and cutthroat passengers goes awry.

The stories in Tuf Voyaging are set in the same fictional "Thousand Worlds" universe as several of Martin's other works, including Dying of the Light, Sandkings, Nightflyers, A Song for Lya and "The Way of Cross and Dragon".

Anittas, meanwhile, betrays Nevis, releasing several of the ship's macroscopic bioweapons, including acid-spitting "hellkittens"; hyper-aggressive, carnivorous, bat-like creatures; spider-like, unimaginably sharp-edged organisms known as "walking webs"; and a T. rex.

This is in spite of evidence that this population explosion will lead, as it has many times in the past, to famine and S'uthlamese attempts at military conquest of adjoining star systems.

Once the S'uthlamese become aware of the Ark and its capabilities, they want to seize it for themselves to use it as both a resource to wring higher caloric production from their star system's biology, and also as a powerful weapon of war.

Tuf works on the problem, and manages to find a solution whereby he uses the seedship's capabilities to provide exotic plants and animals which can yield sustenance for the population, thus staving off starvation for a period of time.

Sessile, aquatic bottom-dwellers (which had hitherto been considered dietary delicacies by the Namorian colonists), they are linked telepathically into a kind of hivemind, controlling the lesser species of life on the planet as skilled bio-engineers.

Tuf establishes communications with the mudpots and brokers a peace agreement whereby his human employers agree to cease eating the planet's autochthonous intelligent species.

You must stop your indiscriminate procreation at once!This is received with predictable religious outrage, and Mune is barely able to extract Tuf from the clutches of an angry S'uthlamese mob.

Tuf gets the last laugh, as the introduction of the various prey species into each House's territory irrevocably changes the regional ecosystem such that all become incapable of sustaining the large predators upon which the gladiatorial contests had originally depended, thus leading to the (unstated) end of the Bronze Arena.

Kreen explains that his society (a technologically advanced secondary colony established as an arcology on the planet Charity) has been taken over by a primitivist religious leader named Moses.

Kreen is sent down to the planet to bring back the former leaders of the now-conquered and evacuated arcology for negotiations, and Tuf offers to help them against Moses for a hefty fee.

Moses, frightened, gives up his claim on the arcology's population, allowing them to escape his nasty, brutish religious fanaticism and return to the comforts of modern civilization.

In the beginning of the novel Tuf is an unassuming and rather inept interstellar trader, of humble and somewhat bland (on the surface) nature, with an aversion to human contact, and a love of cats.

As the story progresses, Tuf's character is revealed to be that of Piper's self-reliant man, as the power of the Ark allows him to solve the apparently intractable problems of several worlds.

Finding that most of his clients' problems arise not primarily from true ecological catastrophes but rather as the result of their cupidity, stupidity, bureaucracy, religious fanaticism and bloody-mindedness, he resolves their situations by addressing their failings, beginning (in the earliest published story, 1976's "A Beast for Norn") with rendering it impossible for the Great Houses of Lyronica to continue the gladitorial animal contests of the Bronze Arena.

On Namor, he finds a solution: seeking out contact with the previously unsuspected native sapient race that had escaped the "fighting guild" of unthinkingly truculent Guardians to end the attacks being inflicted upon the human colonists by the planet's mudpot hivemind.

On Charity, he copes with both the incompetence of the arcology's administrators ("[Y]ou are by training a bureaucrat", says Tuf to Kreen, "and thus good for virtually nothing") and the religious tyranny of Moses' Holy Altruistic Restoration.

Finally, in "Manna from Heaven" (1985), he provides the S'uthlamese and their enemies with an irrevocable solution that simultaneously averts both famine and war but covertly imposes birth control upon the "religious crazies" of S'uthlam's Church of Life Evolving (characterized as "anti-entropists, kiddie-culters, helix-humpers, genepool puddlers"), forcing Mune to accept Tuf's induced population implosion as the only alternative to social breakdown and genocide.

[6] Dave Langford reviewed Tuf Voyaging for White Dwarf #95, and stated that "Solid entertainment, with Martin's meaty storytelling overcoming some shopworn ideas.