A distinguished veteran of science fiction, Frederik Pohl was one of the Futurians, a New York City club of the 1930s and '40s that included Isaac Asimov. Author of The World at the End of Time, his latest novel features Dan Dannerman, a poorly paid government agent in the not-too-distant future. Dannerman discovers aliens on an abandoned space station and is drawn into a conflict that encompasses the universe. According to one of its protagonists, the war Dannerman blunders into centers on what "ordinary people have been used to calling 'Heaven.'" A sequel is promised.

The aliens aren't coming. They're here. We've captured some of them. Are they our saviors, or are they out to destroy us? We've seen no spaceships, received no ultimatums—but the aliens may have a more insidious plot.... Government agent Dan Dannerman and astronomer Patrice Adcock were kidnapped by the aliens and have been returned in altered states, cloned and implanted with strange devices. To what end? Before the reasons behind their abduction can be made clear, a wave of extremist threats and terrorist attacks sweeps the globe. Are the attacks a reaction to the aliens' arrival—or a part of their plan? A race around the earth and into space begins, as humankind desperately tries to prevent the aliens from establishing a beachhead no Earth. The siege has begun.

Dan Dannerman has been through hell. Caught in the middle of an interstellar war that will end only with the death of the universe, he's been captured by aliens who call themselves the Beloved Leaders, cloned repeatedly, torn from his wife, and brutally tortured. Sitting in a prison cell on an alien world, slowly going mad, Dan is finally freed by the Horch, the sword enemies of the Beloved Leaders. The time has finally come for Dannerman to strike back—but at whom? Trusting neither side, Dannerman must somehow convince the Horch to send him back to Earth so he can warn humanity of the approaching alien menace. But when he finally returns he finds an Earth far stranger than he can possibly imagine, an Earth that already has two Dan Dannermans—an Earth already under seige by the Beloved Leaders...