Dawn for a Distant Earth — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

DEVILKID

The Empire spanned the galaxy, leaving abandoned the ruins of old Earth--a frigid devastation of gray deserts and poison, ice storms and land-spouts; a wasteland home only to coyotes and rats, degenerate shambletowners and feral devilkids. Sometimes a fad would sweep the Empire--reclaim the homeworld. But environmental salvation took too long, cost too much, and the fads were always forgotten...

Except by MacGregor Gerswin.

A captured devilkid trained for space combat, he was too savage, too brilliant, too independent for the military, who exiled him to his home. But there Gerswin found a challenge that would consume all his strength and rage, through the decades and centuries of his life. He conspired to wage a one man war against the indifference, the incompetence, the vanity of an empire. He would use patience, politics, manipulation--even sabotage, scandal and ambush.

But--somehow--Gerswin would find a way to bring Earth back from the dead.