A collection of Psychotechnic League stories. In the beginning was World War III... Out of the flames was born a new civilization, a new humanity dedicated to one world rather than to many nations, to one peace rather than many wars. Never again on Planet Earth would one group of humans "defend" themselves against another group equally convinced that all their actions were "defensive." Never again on Planet Earth. But cycles repeat themselves endlessly; Earth is only the beginning of the human story. Next comes planet against planet, and then the stars themselves. Through it all the impersonal forces of historical necessity will tend to force that story into the pathways of tyranny, stasis, and war. And in the end they must prevail. But ever will humankind win free once more...

Stories of a future technological state tell of a robot wanderer, mutiny on a colony ship, a humanist revolutionary, immortality experiments, and an attempted spaceship hijacking

Published with Poul Anderson's "War of the Wing-men". When the Order of Planetary Engineers sent Hall Davenant to Ganymede for a terraforming survey, they knew that the job on the airless, frigid Jovian moon would be tough. Changing it to resemble Earth - with fertile land, water and good air - was the biggest and most important planet conversion job ever attempted by the Engineers. But they hadn't counted on the already too Earthlike behaviour of the Ganymede colonists, who had never altered the ancient Earth-born habits of intrigue, bigotry and double-dyed treachery!

Explorers from a future technological state establish colonies in outer space, battle intergalactic pirates, and set off a terrible war on a distant planet

For 300 years the planet of women awaited the coming of man. Then one arrives... He is Davis Bertram, a space-explorer. But how can he convince them he really is a man? Their legends have built Men into gods. Trying to be worthy of the Coming, the women imitate masculine virtues. They are warlike, ambitious, ruthless. Unless Davis can convince them he is a man, they will kill him for blasphemy. But if he does convince then, the Doctor-Priests will kill him to protect their own iron control of the planet...

Out at the edge of the known. They called themselves The Nomads. Unplanned by-products of the chaotic explosion of mankind into space, they had evolved for themselves a way of life similar to that of the gypsies of ancient Earth - except that their gypsy wagons were mighty starships, each a self-contained world that housed a clan of many thousands. It was a hard life, but the only one the nomads knew, or wanted. But someone, or something, did not want them to have it; one by one the nomad starships were disappearing without a trace - and it fell to Joachim, Captain of the Starship Peregrine, to find out why...