From Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–the basis for the film Blade Runner–Clans of the Alphane Moon explores the meaning of mental illness through the actions of people with clinical disorders and those of the doctors tasked with curing them.

For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and other mentally ill people coming together to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife Mary are going through a bitter divorce, with Chuck losing everything. But when he is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get his revenge.