 The novel is about a group of human freedom fighters who attempt the nearly hopeless task of liberating planet Earth from the grip of a race of alien invaders.The story has obvious overtones of freeing the author's homeland (Lithuania) from its Soviet occupiers.The situation in the early chapters - of the Earth exiles maintaining a government in exile but losing hope of ever liberating their home planet - was clearly familiar to Budrys; his father Jonas Budrys was appointed as the Lithuanian consul general in New York City in 1936, when his son was five years old and continued to hold that position, even though Lithuania was occupied by Nazi Germany and then annexed by the Soviet Union and made into a Soviet Republic - since the United States continued to recognize the pre-World War II Lithuanian government and the exile Lithuanian Diplomatic Service was subsidized by State Department.