In a time of social decline, an aggressive military, and widespread fears of alien invasion, Karn Hannah is sent to evaluate a research proposal from the mad Professor Heinrickson and his team of equally insane assistants. What he finds is a lab teeming with bizarre machine-animal hybrids: there are mice with wheels for legs; there is a frog with a grafted eye on its forehead; there is a tiny tractor with animal eyes on stalks. The Professor wants funding for his ultimate experiment - he wants to create a human-machine hybrid; he wants to graft a human brain into an automated drone.Deciding that the Professor is criminally insane Karn intends to block his research, but he is caught up in a military takeover and arrested by his (evil) twin brother and sent to a prison planet. Languishing in cruel salt mines, along with his criminal cell-mates, he learns of an illegal black market in body parts, run by the prison authorities, and he plans his escape. He is going to smuggle himself out a piece at a time.In an act of deliberate self-harm Karn ends up in the prison medical center, where he is progressively dismembered and his parts shipped off to various recipients back on Earth. And when his brain goes he has finally escaped.Waking in Heinrickson's lab he finds himself inside a mechanical drone with no memory of his previous life and at the mercy of the Professor's lunatic staff. Their attempts to train him with the aid of a cattle prod backfire though and when memory returns he takes control of the entire research center. Life as a sentient drone though is difficult but he manages to obtain a space-going vessel and to equip himself with a huge supply of weaponry by which time he is ready to put into effect the rest of his plan.With the help of his ex cell-mates, whom he has freed, Karn tracks down everyone who received one of his body parts. He arranges a huge gala party at the institute to which all of the recipients are invited where, to the music of a string quartet, they are butchered - an eye here, a kidney there - until he has almost everything to be re-assembled. And finally, back together again, and not entirely sane, he goes after his evil twin, intent on serving up the same fate of dismemberment.Flashbacks to Karn's childhood serve to illustrate the source of the hatred between the twins.This is a mad, surreal, sexy story with loads of horror and gore and in which no-one is entirely sane. There is a great deal of very funny black humor and the script moves at a fast pace with each scene even more lunatic than the one before.