Mining the Genre Asteroid: The Saga of Pliocene Exile by Julian May
22nd Century Earth is a pretty nice place. Earth is becoming more and more integrated into the Galactic Milieu, with alien trade and technology rapidly fixing the problems of Earth and making life better for everyone. Mental powers, for so long disbelieved, distrusted and unreliable, have proven to be a Thing, and it is in fact Man’s discovery of these metapsychic powers that caused First Contact to happen in the first place back in 2013. Yet, even in a Earth heading toward utopia, there are going to be people who are dissatisfied. There are people not so happy with the idea of alien cultures influencing and affecting Earth. There are those who seek a “final frontier”, one even more exotic than colonizing nearby star systems. There are those who seek to disrupt this happy society.