Stated first Ace printing, first appeared in HB in 1981. Tight, clean, flat, square, sharp book with creased spine, light edge wear toned pages. Small tear in the first few pages. The author's first novel, an "utterly modern S-F fable of corrupted innocence." It's set in a utopian world called Quetzalia, which "is no ordinary or simple utopia. On one side of its split society, behind the most curious of fortress walls, lives a culture free of machine technology, with its moral and religious precepts based upon the mystical and more pacifistic practices of ancient tribal Mexico. On the other side, over the planet's wasteland plains, roams a people of abysmal savagery known as Neurovores ('brain-eaters')." Thing are going along pretty well on Quetzalia--the two sides being kept separated by a "river of liquified hate"--until the Earthlings show up and set in motion a "marvelously antic saga, with plots within plots played out against a wickedly funny and wholly ingenious portrait of an aberrational paradise.".