Frederick West is running from something on Earth, something that drove him to sign on for the most distant posting in the solar system: a one-man research station on Pluto's moon. What he finds there is Walter J. Darling, a broken alcoholic who was once a great scientist, now living in a derelict hut and babbling about the things that live beneath Pluto's surface. They call themselves the inhabitants, and for decades they've been experimenting with human mutation, developing hormones that could reshape civilization itself. West is drawn deeper into a world of telepathic entities called the White Singer, the enigmatic scientist Louis Nevin, and a plan so vast it could remake humanity. But the cost of this transformation is everything that makes us human. Simak writes with quiet, creeping dread - this isn't the spectacular horror of alien monsters, but something far worse: the slow dissolution of identity, the terrible seduction of becoming something other than what we are. For readers who want their science fiction contemplative, melancholic, and genuinely unsettling.
