In a future where humanity has spread across the solar system, a revolutionary technology called vitaplasm can reconstruct the dead from their recorded personalities, restoring them to bodies nearly identical to their own. But these "New Women and Men" soon prove superior to natural humans in every way and the world responds with fear. Mitchell Prell, one of vitaplasm's inventors, becomes a scapegoat and is driven into exile. His nephew Ed Dukas and Ed's wife Barbara watch as hysteria mounts toward a war of annihilation. When reason fails, they make an impossible choice: to surrender their humanity and become something more. Gallun writes with the muscular clarity of pulp's golden age, but this is no simple adventure. It is a probing, often painful meditation on what makes us human and whether that definition can survive its own obsolescence. The novel pulses with genuine moral urgency and the strange sorrow of becoming something your own species cannot accept.
