Oldfield deliberately avoided to retell the story in the same sequence as the book and opted to have the album follow the plot "loosely". The story details the destruction of Earth in the year 3600 after the Sun goes nova, for which the planet has 1,600 years to prepare, and sends spaceships to nearby planetary systems. The album took longer for Oldfield to complete than he had initially planned, because the album's science fiction concept limited the type of instruments he could use. This was the case with his 12-string and acoustic guitars that he usually played, which he thought sounded too "Earth-bound" for the album. Instead he had to create a "new vocabulary" of sounds in the studio. Oldfield felt he widened his sound as a result, departing from the Celtic and folk-oriented music that he became known for and write songs that would appeal across multiple generations. Looking back on the album, Oldfield classed it as "very ambient".