Neither the vegetation nor people in this book are entirely fictitious. But, reader, no person pictured here is you. With one exception. You, Sir, Miss, or Madam--whatever your country or station--are Albert Weener. As I am Albert Weener.
As the space fleets of an outraged Terran Confederation close in on the outlaw planet of Fruyling's World, the destinies of slave and master meet explosively, and from the shock of battle and its aftermath come an unexpected and awesome conclusion.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty...
The story starts with a comet that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet.
An obsessed amateur scientist steals a diamond (and murders its owner) in order to make a lens for a super-powerful microscope; his experiment succeeds but he is driven mad by what he discovers.
In the year 2889, people "consume food that is compounded and prepared according to scientific principles, and they breathe an atmosphere freed from the micro-organisms that formerly used to swarm in it; hence they live longer than their forefathers and know nothing of the innumerable diseases of olden times.". Rumours has it that nutritive air is yet to be discovered.