The planet Elysium should be a paradise.

Like Earth before the Age of Waste, it is both beautiful and bountiful, inhabited by peaceful aboriginals and human colonists. But in its chief city, Port of Plenty, the first colonists have kept the superior technology sent from Earth for themselves, governing the outlying settlements with an iron fist.

As unrest grows, two unlikely allies, Richard Florey, an employee of the city's university, and Miguel Lucas, a settler who has 'gone dingo', are caught up in a revolution that could awaken the alien aboriginals and change the balance of power on Elysium forever . . .