My latest idea for a sci-fi story.

[Lord Zombiac]

It opens in a volcanic hell where a stranger swordsman is going into a temple.

In the temple he endures the slavish devotion to a dark god, who has punished the human race for some horrible sin.

a guilt driven, punitive religion has captivated mankind and horrific Spanish inquisition style atrocities are done every day.

People are doing nightmarishly cruel and inhuman things all around him.
We learn:

the earth has been struck by an asteroid.

the asteroid is part of an interstellar drifting field of asteroids that the galactic orbit of our solar system has driven us into.

Some people visit our world.

Some people are from space stations and colonies established before the asteroids. Mostly from objects near Jupiter, whose gravity well protects the smaller worlds in its vicinity.

Some are other worldly visitors who have decided to contact us because they are benevolent.

The protagonist is on a recognizance mission. Ultimately it is his fate whether to spare the now inhospitable and barbaric earth in hopes that it can be saved, or to put it out of its misery.

Another character is also a visitor, but she is fighting to find her little daughter, who was stranded from a spaceship wreck (these are now common in the asteroid saturated solar system) and possibly sold into the child sex slave market.

The protagonist will discover that there is a secret underground of people fighting to preserve our technology and the positive things about the global civilization mankind was on the verge of establishing prior to the asteroid strike.

He forms an alliance with them.

Some adventures occur involving the protagonist's quest to rescue her daughter from the barbarity of earth.

Some hopeful event will tie all of this together.

[Lord Zombiac]

Working title:
"This Cauldron Earth"
also, the protagonist saves works of fiction as a vital instruction in mythology.