Humanity has a driving need to expand and discover; if denied, this breeds discontent, intrigue, and war. By the middle of the twenty-first century AD, the pressure to grow threatened to overwhelm Earth, cradle of humanity. Then, a miraculous discovery in 2075 changed humankind forever: the Masters-Vishenko Wormhole.

At first, this momentous find was nothing but a curiosity, an anomalous comet-track, a slight distortion at the edge of the solar system, beyond Pluto. Had it remained such, humanity may well have slowly burned itself out. Physicist Josef Ben-Gurion was the first to realize that something was there, and in 2076 he proposed that it might well be a Lorentzian Wormhole, a gateway to another part of the Universe. Although initially greeted with skepticism, the idea gained support, and three years later the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Orpheus probe was on its way to the anomaly. When it passed through the wormhole to another stellar system, a new era began for humanity.

From the introduction to The Dream of the Stars, Professor Eddi Vulic