This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope and ambition, filled with wonders that expands Brian Stableford's on-going future history series. Hundreds of years in the future, further ahead than the settings of Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality, Mortimer Gray is born into a world where he can potentially live forever.

But after a traumatic natural disaster that kills millions, Gray devotes the next five hundred years of his life to the study of death and its effects on human civilization, viewed from a post-death perspective. Through it all we see the broad, large-scale accumulation of change and the growth of humanity on Earth and out to the stars as Gray experiences his boundless lifetime.