Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet.

Esta colección de relatos recoge la crónica de la colonización de Marte por parte de una humanidad que huye de un mundo al borde de la destrucción. Los colonos llevan consigo sus deseos más íntimos y el sueño de reproducir en el Planeta Rojo una civilización de perritos calientes, cómodos sofás y limonada en el porche al atardecer. Pero su equipaje incluye también los  miedos ancestrales, que se traducen en odio a lo diferente, y las enfermedades que diezmarán a los marcianos.

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct and the half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind, but the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on Earth....

La Tierra que conociste ya no existe, no es más que un planeta muerto. ¡Deja de soñar, de creer en imposibles y torturarte a ti mismo! ¡Esta es nuestra casa! "No, Iliana," dijo él. "Te equivocas en lo primero, aunque tengas razón en lo segundo, porque desde luego...esta es nuestra casa. Estamos en ella. Siempre lo hemos estado."