In the 24th Century, there is free energy. There are terraformed planets. There is a universe beyond our Solar System that is still vanishingly distant and empty...

The people are the story. An outcast racing pilot named Samson Ford who has a smiling talent for cheating death. A beguiling itinerant mechanic named Stephanie who travels alone and will never talk about her past. A once celebrated racing engineer named Kenichi Iwahara who has been a slave on Mars for twenty years.

...There is a great spaceship race called the Solar Regatta, the race around the sun, that is drawing them each inexorably forward to a point in space and time where their lives will intersect with the future of the Solar System.