Ranna Kikken creates the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but its first 2028 conference is ruined when ex-astronaut Joe Commer time-travels from 2036 to lecture Ranna's nonprofit ladies on the coming breakdown of the solar system and an unavoidable war with a psychotic Alpha Centaurian Empire. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force. Meanwhile, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations from the future, fearing that he's harmed the timeline with his own drug-like time travel experiments.

Michael D. Smith was raised in the Northeast and the Chicago area, then moved to Texas to attend Rice University, where he began developing as a writer and visual artist. The seven novels in his Jack Commer science fiction series, The Martian Marauders; Jack Commer, Supreme Commander; Nonprofit Chronowar; Collapse and Delusion; The Wounded Frontier; The SolGrid Rebellion; and Balloon Ship Armageddon, are published by Sortmind Press. In addition, Sortmind Press has published his literary novels Sortmind, The Soul Institute, Akard Drearstone, CommWealth, Jump Grenade, and Asylum and Mirage.

Smith's web site, sortmind.com, contains further examples of his novels and visual art, and he muses about writing and art processes at blog.sortmind.com.