Brilliantly Conceived Creepy and Compelling John E. Boyd, city-Earth graduate student obsessed with the Great Emigration, eagerly pursues the lost team of Guanjo. His bold journey to their eerily silent outpost begins on Intrepid, an outbound commercial liner, but John must soon take refuge with the beastly crew of the massive tramp steamer Leviathan, and later must haggle with mysterious pirates for a craft capable of risking his final deadly light-shift. On an epic journey into space, John encounters wildly fascinating people, some threatening and some endearing, but all human. His ambition is to encounter a truly alien race - to discover the first non-human intelligence inhabiting outer space. John discovers more than he imagines infesting the jungle forests of Guanjo. Now, his mission is genocide.