From the introduction: Established first as a sprawling prison colony shot up to Mars in hopes of using the prisoners to build a decadent city for the richest of Earth’s population, the terrible storms and brutal temperature fluctuations on the planet eventually led to the project being scrapped altogether, and the prisoners being abandoned there. But they continued to build and terraform. Finally, despite hundreds of years of isolation from Earth, the city of Icarus has been transformed into a massive futuristic frontier town hailed as the new Wild West.