Bruce's story chronicles (and criticizes) the career of Lord Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick, a consul of the fictional Yukon Confederacy whose life closely parallels that of Alexander the Great.

This unique style allows the reader to simultaneously learn the "official history" of Fitzpatrick as well as the revisionist version of Bruce's purported work.

In the mid twenty-first century, civil order began to break down in the United States and elsewhere in North America and Europe through the rise of many rival factions and gangs.

Over the next several decades global civilization largely collapsed, leading to plagues, famine, and many local wars which killed additional hundreds of millions.

Finally, Latin America is dominated by a collection of banana republics; among others, Judson lists a bandit-plagued Mexico, Brazil (since the Muslim conquest of Europe, the home of the Pope), Greater Colombia, and the Argentine Empire.

The Confederacy is governed by provincial Lords, who are theoretically elected to serve in the Senate in Cumberland, their capital city, but in practice often pass their position to their children.

During his time as a student, Bruce also makes the acquaintance of Doctor Jonathan Nehemiah Murrey, ostensibly a professor of history, and an Irish Traveller girl named Charlotte Raft.

Upon graduation Bruce is dispatched to India, where he works with a group of engineers constructing illegal airfields at the direction of Fitzpatrick the Younger.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick subdues the nations of the Western Hemisphere and much of Africa, forcing them to sign the "Four Points Agreement" surrendering much of their independence to the Yukon Confederacy.

Shortly thereafter an attempted coup by some of Fitzpatrick's most trusted friends (and his mother) is put down, but the Consul himself is left at the brink of madness and is nursed back to a semblance of health only by the efforts of Bruce, who by this time has become disillusioned with the actions of his liege lord.

Finally, Bruce finds himself manipulated into assassinating Fitzpatrick by the devious Murrey and his Timermen comrades, who threaten his family with death.

To achieve this end, they will continually promote the rise of a Yukon empire and then bring it crashing down through internal discontent, until the time when the rest of the world had been reduced to Stone Age conditions.

Pan-Slavic workers who had been brought in to settle and build the city are forced to fight their way home, in an episode reminiscent of the march of the Ten Thousand described by Xenophon.

Fitzpatrick's in-laws, the Shay family, seize power and usher in a financially and morally corrupt regime that is ultimately overthrown in a coup (in which Bruce himself participates).