Distant Kingdoms: The Drodenar Project, Folly of the Gods [Hardcover] Gill, Ian Richard and Gill, Jason E

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 years of independent development on Drodenar, including wars and social breakdown, Humanity returns to pick up where they left off, only to find a very different planet than the one they left. Drodenar has once again been influenced by the rogue world's 1,000-year orbit through the system, and once again has fallen into a "Time of Ice." Meet the team of researchers and experience the epic story of the Andros' struggle to achieve ultimate stability and independence in the first of my three-book series.