Christine Pizan introduces herself through first-person narration as an artist who practices her craft aboard a space station orbiting high above Earth in 2049. The formerly vividly blue and green ball below is now just a sepia-toned “dying ball of dirt.” Things have changed quickly and badly.
The orbiting station is known as CIEL and Christine’s art is a relatively brand-new aesthetic in which “stories” are literally branded into the pale, translucent skin of the genderless beings that most human beings have become. It is her 49th birthday, which means that, according to the law of this new world, she has just one year of life left before the “ascension,” which is really just another name for self-destruction. This extreme population control is required because of a significantly reduced supply of available water.
CIEL is now run by an authoritarian dictator named Jean de Men who began his rise to power as a charlatan selling self-help advice before becoming a successful author and TV celebrity. He exploited the power of television to propagandize himself into the big cheese running things high above the ball of dirt below.
But Earth is more than just a ball of dirt. It is also the home of a resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing the fascist ruler above. Christin and her friend Trinculo soon find themselves arrested by the authorities on the charges of being members of this resistance. Furthermore, Trinculo has been sentenced to execution for the crime of conspiring with the resistance that is led by a half-mythic figure know as Joan of Dirt. The strange backstory of Joan’s acquisition of seemingly supernatural abilities beyond the ken of the now mostly weakened human species is a tale told on the skin of Christine Pizan.
Joan is like a modern-day reincarnation of Joan of Arc, complete with epic visions foretelling war and devastation. Only, for this Joan, it is the entire planet that is at risk of being wiped away, not just France. And the force behind this devastation was Jean de Men and his ecological rape of the planet’s limited and finite supply of natural resources. Rather than allow this, Joan used her incredible powers to bring upon the earth a more natural cataclysmic event which left Earth uninhabitable. In response, Joan de Men led the way to CIEL and further consolidated his rule.
While most humans aboard CIEL are a pale, weak and genderless new version of the species, there are also beings known as “engenderines” who are a strange mutation of human form and pure energy which allows for very interesting powers like teleportation and telekinesis. Christine becomes close with one of these beings named Nyx, and together they conspire to build a better mousetrap in which to trap Jean de Men just long enough to assassinate and thereby save Trinculo from his execution.
Taking refuge in Vietnamese caverns, Joan flashes back to an earlier time when she and her companion, Leone, happened upon a young boy whom they named Miles. Miles persisted in his story that there were other survivors of Joan’s call to cataclysm, and he had no choice but to return to them with the story of having discovered Joan still lives. She writes a letter for Miles to carry back to the other survivors. Meanwhile, Leone comes across a stranger at the entrance to the cavern and stabs him to death before learning that he was Joan’s brother, Peter. Joan calls upon her magical powers to bring him back to life just long enough to learn that resistance members who have discovered the secret to how those on Earth can make their way up to CIEL. In quick succession, Peter dies for good, Leone is taken by the forces of Jean de Men, and Joan is saved by the teleportation powers of Nyx. They wind up in the homeland of the original Joan—France—where Joan learns from Nyx that she now has the ability to combine her own powers with those of the engenderines to bring Earth back to life. There is only one problem: this resurrection can only be accomplished with the sacrifice of Joan’s own life.
Back on the space station, Christine is beginning to put her plan to assassinate Jean de Men into action. Jean de Men sits in the audience with his newest prize, Leone, as a play commences on stage. At the agreed-upon signal from Christine, the actors suddenly unleash their full fury upon the dictator. In his dying throes, an almost unholy secret about him is suddenly revealed: the scars of a surgery designed to transform his gender. Christine is shocked to her core at the realization that the despised dictator of CIEL, Jean de Man, had come in the world with the biological anatomy of a woman. Leone, who had been grotesquely attacked by Jean before his death, is rescued with the sudden arrival of Joan and the united forces of the engenderines. Together, Joan and Leone return to the surface. Having been saved from execution, Trinculo joins Christine in establishing control over CIEL and together they proceed to program it out of its orbital trajectory so that it will head straight for the sun in a desperate bid to completely annihilate even the memory of the dictatorial regime of Jean de Men.
Back on Earth, Leone assists Joan in the self-sacrifice required for the regeneration of Earth to its former state of bounty.
