My new novel, The Hope is set in 2082 in Tasmania. The world as we know it now has been completely altered by climate change and war. Vast parts of the planet have become uninhabitable to humans. A new feudalism has descended, and the remaining few hundred million people live lives of servitude and ignorance, isolated from rest of the world, ruled by the tyrants responsible for the cataclysm. The book is the third in the series, following three generations of one family as they navigate the result of our self-inflicted folly.
The Forcing, the first in the series, covers the period 2039 to 2045, and introduces a world in the midst of a slow-motion collapse, where youth has taken power in North America in a desperate attempt to prevent total disaster. The follow up, The Descent, which bookends The Forcing, starts in 2024 and describes just how the world described in The Forcing came about, while following the descendants of The Forcing as they struggle to survive in a maimed world in the late 2060s.
The idea for the series came to me more or less complete back in 2011 while camping with my wife and two sons on a remote island in the wild and sparsely populated south of Western Australia. At the time I was heavily involved in a huge project that would potentially create significant damage to the ocean environment and add significantly to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. I was working to convince stakeholders that the project was environmentally unacceptable, and felt that I was losing the battle (fifteen years later, the battle is still being fought). I went for a long swim around the island in very cold water and there it was, the whole story.
The motivation behind it was clear. Watching my two young boys, nine and eleven at the time, their delight in the beautiful natural surroundings, knowing what the future held for them if we didn’t change direction, I wanted to warn people what the future might very well look like. As one of the characters says in The Hope, what we have is a failure of imagination. We can’t imagine just how bad it can get if we don’t fix the problems we know we have, and we also can’t imagine how good it could be if we did. I wanted to write a series that would do both. It’s a cautionary tale, clearly. The world described in these books is not one that anyone but the most hardened psychopath would want. But it’s also a blueprint for hope, for what we need to do to avert this disaster. There is still time, and we have all the means we need right now to shape the future we want. It’s not impossible, and it’s not hopeless, quite the contrary. But it is urgent, and it will take our best.
The Hope is a story of courage and sacrifice, about the power of the human spirit, and the belief that we can create a better world for all. The forces of darkness want our acquiescence, our silence. They want us to give up and let them run the world. Hope is what keeps people going, steels them for the fight, what motivates them to say enough, it’s our future, and we claim it back. We only have to imagine that future, and then decide that we are going to do what it takes to get it. And without giving anything away, the answer lies in each of us. In 2026, go forth, and take back your future.
Dr Paul E. Hardisty is author The Hope, the final book in The Forcing Trilogy, which includes The Forcing and The Descent. The Hope is published by Orenda Books.
