In a universe where the poor remain on earth and the rich live in space, a poverty-stricken Black teenager with a life-threatening illness dreams of visiting the upper world and is offered a chance to do so through a high school science contest.

An aging Caucasian ex-military pilot-turned-farmer and his wife struggle to maintain control of two newly acquired buffalo, while wildfires and drought blacken the sky and the farmer's sister becomes increasingly subsumed by doomsday cultism. cults build shelters to prepare for nuclear destruction. Set in the present day.

When an anthropology professor moves with his family to a remote home on the Great Plains, a new friendship with an idealist, a landscaping disaster, and a disheartening consultation with an Indigenous man shake his beliefs about cultural relativism to the core.