In Stephen Baxter’s novels Flood and Ark, a handful of refugees in a primitive starship flee a drowning Earth. The survivors of the journey reach new worlds they called ‘Earth II’ and ‘Earth III’ . . .  What happens next? Three stories, one original to this collection, show a new destiny for a star-scattered mankind.

The 1960s: years of economic turmoil, Cold War political tensions, secretive military projects and deranged megalomaniacs. Chapman Jones and Thelma Bennet, of the UK Ministry of Defence Secretariat 8, are detailed to seek out the strange, the enigmatic, from life forms within the Earth disturbed by nuclear testing, to rumours of Brobdingnagian humans glimpsed on Salisbury Plain . . .

In the author’s scientific romance Anti-Ice, in the early Victorian age a comet laced with a kind of antimatter—and carrying remarkable life forms—brushes the Earth before smashing into the moon. British engineers fall on the anti-ice, a new industrial revolution begins and, in 1870, steam-powered rockets reach space. What next, for the Empire and the world? And what if that comet had hit, not the moon, but the Earth? In the early seventeenth century Isaac Newton, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift must deal with an extraordinary invasion from space . . .