Samuel Bluck is having a crisis, Life has moved in with him. Life is large, pink and fat with a squeaky voice.
Elsewhere in the universe Skidmore Shuffledeck is puzzled by the seeming disappearance of his ship's navigator, a gestalt being named Sara. He climbs aboard the stricken water buffalo he's claimed as salvage, a frozen ocean its cargo, only to wake up on the floor of the toilet at a Hawkwind gig.
Brutus traverses a stretched Earth with his father and a company of circus folk. Separated from all he knows he encounters first a quagga, then a mechanical alien, before undergoing a metamorphosis unlike any he has previously endured.