The Anguished Dawn is a sequel to James Hogan's Cradle of Saturn, a past Prometheus Award finalist for Best Novel.

Both are good stories, but suffer from the same problem. Hogan is over the top in his promotion of a Velikovskian cosmology. It seems that he is not really trying to tell a good story. He is pushing Velikovsky's eccentric theories.

In Cradle of Saturn, Earth is devastated by a near collision with a planet ejected from Jupiter. In The Anguished Dawn the civilization based in Saturn's moons (the Kronians) decides to return to Earth and help survivors rebuild. A small team is sent. The team is made up of Kronians and former rescued Terrans. Most of the Terrans are unhappy with the Kronian model of mutual aid and want to return to the old Earth statist methods. The Pragmatists, as they call themselves, stage a coup on Earth and assert themselves by force, taking over the Kronian ships and ground base.

One of the rescued Terrans, Landen Keene, has fully integrated himself into the Kronian culture and is very happy with it. He does not want the old statist model to return. Only he can stop the Pragmatists, as only he fully understands what they are doing.

The Korians are hopelessly confused as they have never dealt with coercion before. They don't understand what is happening.

Keene must somehow solve the problem without resorting to the Pragmatist methods of force and compulsion. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the solution is a copout.

The other sub-text is Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, which is explicitly mentioned in the book. As this isn't pushed anywhere near as hard as Velikovsky, it actually works. The description of a voluntary society based on the concept of mutual aid instead of direct competition and compulsion is interesting and believable, up to a point.

The concept of respect as currency is especially appealing. If anything, I wish Hogan had developed these ideas further. His description is shallow. For example, how are scarce goods, such as housing, allocated? This type of voluntary system raises a lot of interesting questions. Unfortunately the book neither asks nor answers them.