FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW… In the 21st century, Planet Earth was in the grip of an orientalized, paternalistic World State that gave all—and took all. Only in the land that was once the United States were the principles of freedom paid so much as lip service, and even there liberty flickered toward extinction. In such a world as this the Jeffersonians were a band of hopeless visionaries, political cranks, a quixotic underground dreaming of the reinstitution of the American Constitution. But then a star drive was developed and the Jeffersonians were sentenced to eternal exile. On a world twenty light years and a century from their homes they set out to create a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that the individual is more important than the state. They are the New Americans. This is their story. SPECIAL BONUS: The Hugo and Nebula Winning THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS, and HOME. The benevolent, paternalistic World State regarded the freedom-minded Jeffersonians as a minor embarrassment whose violent elimination would cause more disruption than their demise would merit. So both sides were happy when the chance came for voluntary exile to a distant planet. But two hundred years later the less benevolent descendant of the World State that had let them go was to decide that the cosmos was not big enough to hold both it and a free people… [Best viewed with CoolReader.]