Africa is the last frontier in a starving and overpopulated world. A world gone dry. A world of horror where literacy and thought are for machines only. Where cities are beehives built on stilts to protect them from the chemicals which grow crops. Where penal institutions are collective farms. Where petty infractions condemn men to work for the rest of their lives alongside robots tilling the dead soil. The world is a place where corpses stalk the earth, for there is no longer room in the ground.

Africa is the last hope for Knowle Noland. He has escaped the farms, wrecked a ship, and fled The System only to encounter Peter Mercator, an old oppressor with new ideas--and Justine, a complex and mysterious femme fatale who equates annihiliation with salvation... And she wants Knowle Noland to fire the shot which will plunge the world into chaos.