In order to fully appreciate the story this book contains, you really need to read the previous books in the Shonak Series. There you will learn about this very different race of people on an alternate Earth and their complex relationship with the people of Earth. The Shonakians are a simple, placid people but so different from us that a great deal of background is provided in the first book, The Crown of Happenstance. That book introduces Bon of Shonak, who you will read more of in the following two books. There is also Itself, the over spirit of the "Six Earths", and Atsa, a proto-Hopi and tribal chief. This is where you learn the details about Shonak, and its people, about their phase altering technology, about their thirst for intellectual and technical conquest, and about their love for Earthwatching. The next book, It's About Time, discovers a new relationship between Earth and Shonak. Itself
causes an otherwise inexpl icable time shif t that propels Earth 3210 years into its future while there is no time-change on Shonak. Because Earth is now an advanced, technological world, Shonak openly introduce themselves. They do not reveal their extensive surveillance operation and its invasion of privacy on Earth, which has turned the planet into a virtual zoo for Shonak's voyeuristic pleasure. They do, however, think they owe Earth something for it. They offer their assistance in areas of crime control, better agriculture, using ocean water for crops and drinking, cleaning the oceans, etc. All the while Shonak continues to expand its surveillance of everyone and everything, everywhere, using their massive f leet of surveillance bots, some of
which look like rocks or trees, while others look like beetles, birds, dogs and cats, and people, among other things. The human-looking bots, the humbots, are perfect in every detail. There is eventually a scandal over the humbots, once Earth discovers them, and this causes Earth to sever all ties with Shonak for one hundred years. Book Three contains a series of bot-collected vignettes, or short stories of Earther behavior prepared for young Shonakian students in the final quarter of their formal, forty-year education. These people live beyond 1600 years so forty years of schooling is not a significant sacrifice and there is so much to learn before they can join adult society on their own. These vignettes are designed to prepare the young, pre-adult Shonakians for their long life of Earther vid-watching. Every Shonakian enjoys watching the very different people of Earth go about their complex, difficult, conf licted lives and join VidWatch clubs that specialize in different aspects of life on Earth they find particularly interesting.
Book Four shows how Earth catches up to Shonak in terms of their most impactful technologies: compact battery packs of enormous power, phase-change, and anti-gravity f light. Earth also develops a way to detect every kind of Shonakian surveillance device, from the rock to the human, and they are amazed and unhappy to find the true extent of the integration of humbots in Earth society with millions of them in operation. They also have many more billions of static collection devices and countless animals and insects all designed to watch and record and entertain the multitude of
Shonak's Vid-Watch clubs. While Earth has known that they collect video and audio of life on Earth they had no idea how large an effort this had become. This latest book discovers how Earth responds to this latest bot scandal. It's payback time!
