The storyline follows the adventures of Homer Crawford, a charismatic leader of the Reunited Nations African Development Project, Sahara Division team. He is an American black and an ex-Marine with a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan who speaks Arabic, Esperanto, French, Tamabeq, Songhoi, and Swahili. The central themes of these stories are the subversion of a society's status quo in the name of socioeconomic progress and the continual search for a better society.