Our story takes place on a small green-blue planet, partly covered with clouds, which circles near the warmth of a medium-sized yellow star. No, this is not the earth circling the sun. The earth is very different now. Its oceans are still blue but the land is gray, covered with radioactive dust. In the final throes of the environmental crisis of the late twenty-first century, when nations were fighting desperately for the last of the oil and clean water and other resources, nuclear weapons were finally used. Those old predictions about nuclear winter turned out to be right.
