 On these generations hang the novel's basic plots – a murder story, a domestic story, a political story and a revenge story.The first involves Klara Gyeroffy and her father, an aeronautics hobbyist, in their establishment of the low Earth orbit settlement of the Uplands.With the advent of more efficient propulsion technology, space travel reaches a new level of attainability, the Uplands phenomenon being a product of direct access, for those wealthy enough, to the lower orbits.