A KILGORE TROUT NOVEL When the planet is destroyed during a botched cleaning operation, Simon Wagstaff narrowly escapes the deluge on an abandoned Chinese spaceship and becomes Earth's lone survivor. Accompanied by his pets—an owl and a dog— and a beautiful robot companion, Wagstaff adventures through space seeking the definitive answer to the ultimate question: why are we created only to suffer and die? Featuring brand-new afterwords By Jonathan Swift Somers III and Christopher Paul Carey.