Synopsis: From the flaps of the Avalon edition: "In 1969, a depression resulted in the British government's abandoning it plan to shoot a crew around the moon, after spending millions of pounds on a revolutionary one-stage rocket. Frederick Reynolds, an airplane manufacturer, bought the ship for scrap, and he finished it at his Folkstone plant. Experts had said that the ship did not carry sufficient lead shielding to protect the crew while going through the Van Allen radiation belts, but this was a moot point. Reynolds' mistake was in not planning to give the ship a spin around her longitudinal axis, so that centrifugal force inside the spinning hull would have provided substitute gravity during free fall. In any event, government inspectors made difficulty and Reynolds hired a friend, Thomas Kane - engaged to Mary Hayworth, another member of the crew - to take Reynolds' place. The ship made the trip without difficulty, and landed in the Mediterranean less than five miles from the spot where she had been planned to fall. But the crew of the Moonraker were all suffering from what seemed to be first degree burns; their eyes and brains were affected, and their motor muscles partially or wholly paralyzed. Of the four, two died soon after; Tom Kane recovered, although permanently weakened in heart and eyes, and Mary Hayworth was crippled for life. And Kane lived to exact vengeance on Frederick Reynolds' tightfistedness which was responsible for the tragedy. But the feud took strange forms as the Moon conquered, contact with the Martian civilization made, and Venus opened to the strangest experiment in criminal sociology ever made. Wildoatia, the free state to which all criminals and delinquents were sent to live as they liked without interference from the Earth-Mars federation, known as the United Stars. Here is a fascinating novel of the future which covers three worlds, and nearly a century of time, when the Moon was made into a green planet, and the pathway to the stars opened up; and through it run the unforgettable figures of Colonel Thomas Kane and his tomboy daughter, Sadie. Their saga deals with the period between the present era and the events described in Mr. West's novel The Memory Bank."