Out of Time and The Sunset Saga have the same back-story. In the novels I obscure the back-story as long as possible. This is frustrating for some readers who want to know a little more of the why than what the characters know. So here goes the abridged version.
The 29th Century
The world at the end of the third millennium, as I see it, is largely stripped of human diversity and teetering on the brink of an ice age. Mankind’s plan for surviving is twofold: a generation ship launched to the stars; and terra-forming earth and then colonizing the resulting far future with a time travel device. The dilemma is that the remaining humans are not robust enough to accomplice this themselves. They are also certainly not cut out for journeys into the deep past in search of suitable colonists, preferably children, that can be educated.
The 24th Century
Two 29th Century time-travelers journey to the 24th Century, a time dominated by vicious political intrigue among the five ruling Human Fabrication Corporations. The two time travelers know that in this timeframe, operatives uniquely well-suited for journeying into the deep past to salvage doomed primitives may be cultivated. However, the nature of 24th Century society makes the basing of such a ‘chronological reclamation’ program impractical and hazardous.
The 21st Century
The genetically engineered human deep retrieval assets, specifically built and altered by a team drawn from three of the 24th Century HBCs, are imbedded in the late 20th Century. Not knowing what they are, they are to be activated as time-hunters by their 24th Century handlers, teamed with 21st Century recruits, and launched into the past as small retrieval teams.
Pillaging the Past
With two 29th Century factions [the generation ship and terra-farming concerns] and two 24th Century factions [a Christian-science cult and a corporate board] desirous of receiving geniuses such as Aristotle and Leonardo, as well as salvaged members of extinct races, and with some of these primitives developing goals of their own, the ‘chronological reclamation project’ devolves into a scramble for control of the finite number of time travel devices as well as the humans reclaimed from the past.
That is how I outlined a sci-fi setting in which geeks use freaks to plunder the past in order to seed a new future. The back-story is intentionally murky as it is largely seen from the freak and primitive [which includes 21st Century characters] point-of-view.
