This book is set in an Alternate America. When President Franklin Roosevelt choked to death on a chicken bone in 1933, it signaled the start of a brave new world - a world in which America would ally with the USSR against the threat of the Anglo-Chinese Alliance - a world where the death on the Moon of rock superstar Bitch Alice sparked a Wracker explosion that would would obliterate America's space programme and leave Straight and Wracker alike at the mercy of their enemies' nuclear bomb-loaded station.