After a new cannery introduces scientifically augmented salmon to a seaside town in the Pacific Northwest, a species of mysterious, mutated sea creatures begin killing the men and raping the women.
A big-city female doctor returns to her roots in the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains to bring modern medicine to the local folks in the Appalachia of the 1930s and finds herself at odds with the homespun ways of the resident medicine woman.
The story, set in the twenty-second century, follows the adventures of the McCallister family, owners of McCallister's Midway Inn, a hotel-restaurant-saloon on an orbiting way station somewhere between Earth and Pluto.