4 ideas
Through ordinary fieldwork he realizes the townspeople are not what they seem: they are aliens from a vast galactic civilization living as copies of typical Americans in one of many hidden colonies on Earth. Offered a place among them, he must choose between joining the superior civilization and staying loyal to a humanity that is still earthbound.
Real communities are lumpy: they carry local history, feuds, eccentrics, and deviations from the statistical norm. A town that matches the textbook profile of an average community too cleanly suggests the pattern was imitated from the outside rather than grown from within. The anomaly is not something strange but the absence of the strangeness that genuine social life always produces.
The anthropologist's method of census-taking, mapping kinship and genealogy, collecting life histories, and asking naive questions makes him record things that insiders never examine. Because he checks behavior against a structured model of how communities work, gaps that locals overlook, such as missing roots, shallow pasts, and relationships that don't connect, become visible data. Here the stranger's discipline, not special insight, is the instrument of discovery.
The novel argues that technical advancement and cultural vitality are separate axes, and that absorption into a superior system would drain a people's capacity to make its own meaning. Ellery's choice rests on the view that a society must reach its future on its own terms, not be handed it.