The end of the world has been and gone.
There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Rather scores of storms, droughts and floods; dozens of vicious, selfish regional conflicts that only destroyed what could no longer be rebuilt. No single finishing stroke for Earth's great global human society, but you can still bleed to death from a thousand cuts.
The Red Planet fared better. Where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees, an outlawed distributed …