In this story, the joint product of two imaginative minds, we get a very unusual picture of some of the possibilities of interplanetary exploration. We know that as soon as interplanetary travel is possible, expeditions from the earth will be ranging the length and breadth of the solar system searching out the thousands of wonders that are to be discovered.
It is quite possible that some of the explorers, whether through accident or desire, may colonize the other planets and develop under new and unusual conditions a new branch of the human race. It is doubtlessly true that if each of the solar planets were to be colonized, at the end of several hundred centuries there would be nine races of human beings who might differ radically from each other and in fact might not recognize each other as members of the same human stock.
In this story we do not see nine races but we do see four of them and Mr. Starzl has united the four in a gripping narrative of the great spaces.