Distant Kingdoms : Tellwell Talent : 9780228846505 : 0228846501 : 25 Mar 2021 : Distant Kingdoms: The Drodenar Project, Folly of the Gods begins in the early centuries of the Third Millennium AD, in a Galactic Earth Empire whose citizens enjoy engineered immortality and the technology to alter and create life in many forms with the aid of their sentient AI. A university research project locates a planet cast into an ice age by the near passing of a rogue world, upon which exists a threatened ecosystem on the verge of collapse. While the team works to correct the planet's tilt and orbit and restore the ecology, they discover a species which they develop and imbue with sentience. Over the next millennia, Mankind gives its creation an Early Bronze Age level of knowledge and tech, and guidance that results in a Golden Age, but when a war of independence breaks out across the empire, the research team is forced to leave Drodenar, and the Androgenari, to their own devices. After a thousand y