Ralph Ridley is caught in the shackles of time. Cursed and stunted, he's destined to lose everyone and everything. Earth is approaching its next ice age and people are being sent to Alpha Centauri to escape it. Ralph is stuck. Lost. He lives in desperation, reading and thinking, toiling and tinkering. He masters mathematics. He conquers quantum mechanics. He theorises and experiments and builds contraptions that engineers (and magicians) could only ever dream of. Little does he know though, the answer to all his suffering may not lie on the little blue planet he calls home. But in the cosmos beyond.