This was an excellent novel. Sargent again surprised me as in Venus of Dreams with her ability to treat the personal, the familial in a realistic way while set in a science-fiction setting. This novel is a slow burn that illustrates step by step how people can fall into fundamentalist beliefs that allow them to rationale treating other human beings as less deserving of humanitarian treatment. It is interesting to read this novel written in the 1980s during the 2020s when the same issues of organized intolerance are still occurring in our current reality. And these issues are played out at the very human level of the individual members of a single family who each have very different ideas of how society should develop in a new world. A good tagline for this novel could be “the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.” I highly recommend this book. ( )