Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointe… - Stephen Baxter

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.

There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?

This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.