"THAT PLANET HAS NO RIGHT TO BE THERE!" Among the Saturnian moons, farsighted individuals, working without help or permission from any government, have established a colony. They call themselves the Kronians, after the Greek name for Saturn. Operating without the hidebound restrictions of bureaucratic Earth, the colony is a magnet, attracting the best and brightest of the home world, and has been making important new discoveries. But one of their claims—that they have found proof that the Solar System has undergone repeated cataclysms, and as recently as a few thousand years ago—flies in the face of the reigning dogma, and is under attack by the scientific establishment. Then the planet Jupiter emits a white-hot protoplanet as large as the Earth, which is hurtling sunwards like a gigantic comet that will obliterate civilization....

After Earth is devastated by a near miss from a protoplanet that destroys civilization, leaving survivors on the edge of barbarism, technology, culture, and knowledge are preserved only in the Kronian colony near Saturn that sends Landen Keene to help rebuild Earth's civilization, but others will do anything to regain their former privileges and power, in the sequel to Cradle of Sature. Reprint.