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The last thing Colonel Reid Malenfant remembers is his Space Shuttle crashing - until he wakes up in the mid-24th 25th Century, on an Earth massively depopulated and patiently waiting for the coming apocalypse. Suffering from severe culture shock, he tries to adjust to this new world. But all of this is changed when he receives a message from his wife Emma...who died on a mission to Phobos all the way back in 2004. As it slowly dawns on him that their timelines don't match up, he resolves to find a way to Phobos. But, this new society doesn't believe in space travel and no-one is willing to help him, until he meets a driven young woman who desperately wants to explore as much as he does...

The protagonist of the book is Colonel Reid Malenfant, USAF and former NASA Space Shuttle pilot, who has been awakened from a rudimentary cryonic suspension and experiencing a severe case of culture shock in the mid-24th 25th Century. He has been awakened because his wife Emma, although apparently from a different timeline, requires rescuing from Phobos, where she is believed to have died in 2004. Malenfant is accompanied on his mission by Bartholemew, a medical android with a particularly caustic sense of humour, and Greggson Deirdre, a childishly enthusiastic yet ambitious young woman who desires to see what lies beyond Earth. While Malenfant is the viewpoint character for the vast majority of the book, Deirdre is quite obviously the heroine, since she is the one who makes most of the decisions and the different sections of the book refer to ‘her’ not ‘him’.

The setting is really interesting, because not only is it set in the future, it’s also set in multiple alternate histories. In Malenfant’s home universe, Neil Armstrong died of a heart attack on the moon, which spurred a new wave of funding to NASA. As such, the design of the Saturn V was modified to enable interplanetary travel (an idea known as the Saturn C-5 that was designed, but never put into production due to funding cuts), putting men on Mars by 1985. The design of the Space Shuttle is different too, with the SRBs and fuel tank instead being replaced by another Space-Shuttle-shaped booster that gets to orbit on its own power, and has been in service since at least 1978 and has clocked in over 700 missions. Emma’s timeline, meanwhile, is broadly similar to our own, except that a joint American-Russian manned mission to Phobos was launched in 2004 (which Emma was on). As for the future segments, Earth has been taken over by a movement known as the Common Heritage, which declared an end to all space travel and colonisation, leaving the various bases to be managed by the Planetary AIs. There are also massive reforestation projects underway, with the Sahara desert now being entirely green, mostly to offset the massive amount of carbon dioxide that has been dumped into the atmosphere. Humanity now numbers less than a billion people, most of whom. Also, they managed to discover Planet 9, known as Persephone (which plays a significant role later on in the book), and an object known as Shiva, the titular destroyer, which is estimated to arrive in less than a thousand years. The rich worldbuilding is by far one of the best things about the book.