When the novel begins, Francis holds his vigil centuries after a nuclear war devastated the population and the landscape. In response, society punished the scientific and intellectual communities, created a new world in which few people were literate, and let the world slide back into a period of ignorance. The monks at the abbey preserved (and memorized) enough documents to make scientific discoveries (or rediscoveries) possible again. By the novel’s end, not only has the Dark Age of Francis’s time ended, but humanity finds itself in the most advanced cycle yet: a world advanced enough for manned starships.

However, as Zerchi sees the political tension in the world and the threat of a new nuclear war, he asks himself:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion (298).