When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

Astronaut Roy McBride must undertake a harrowing journey to the edge of our solar system when his long-lost scientist father seems to have resurfaced despite having been declared dead many years ago. His reappearance appears to be connected to a series of mysterious explosions and a top secret military project. As McBride makes his way across a series of increasingly dangerous outposts on the Moon and Mars, forces converge to stop him from finding answers while another impending explosion threatens to destroy life as we know it.