Behind the Scenes of Chapter 3

Hindsight — Chapter 3 — March 2038 — Holding On

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Hindsight by Neil Shooter (photo by author)

The new reality is necessary, but not what anyone had hoped their future would be.

It’s 2038. What’s changed? So much, and so little.

Maxwell comes for a visit, but it isn’t a social call. There’s a lot of bad blood between Bill and Maxwell now, but what’s behind it? Did they never talk after Juss died in 2024? It feels like it could be something else, something more than that.

And what has Mayor Fiorini got to do with anything? Bill does NOT like him, but why?

An ETV is an electric-powered ATV (all-terrain vehicle, a.k.a. four-wheeler).

The Covid Cohort was my imagined result of months of 2020 lockdowns leading to a BUMP in pregnancies and in 2021 birth rates. I had this idea because of a previous “double cohort” I remember from a few years ago. Ontario used to do high school up to Grade 13. But, I forget why, they stopped it one year, so one “cohort” of high school graduates graduated when they finished Grade 13 and at the same time the year below ALSO graduated but from Grade 12 -- the double cohort.

Five years out from 2020, I’m not getting the sense that the lockdown led to any statistically relevant blip.

The elephant in the room in 2038 is that community expectations have changed, along with property ownership, agriculture, and habitation patterns.

Each (Health) Unit, which in 2020 was pretty much analogous with the local county, is now separated into Sub-Districts, more or less matching the municipal and township borders within the county. This shows a change in governance from the political boundary to the health authority boundary. It didn’t seem outlandish at the time, merely an extrapolation of how things were going.

Anyone with a garden is expected to produce food.

Anyone with spare bedrooms and bathrooms is expected to accommodate strangers.

It seems like a communist nightmare, but, in the Hindsight Universe, it was the only way for civilization to survive the 2020s.

There are three strangers Bill must choose between. It’s not a clear-cut decision.

Asher Burkholder is not cut out for farming. He has his head in the clouds, or rather, in outer space.

Asher comes across, to me, as a self-absorbed health nut. At first. But he displays a number of uncertainties that I find endearing, including being embarrassing about his interest in the stars. When Asher says “The moon is pretty,” and blushes again, it is a significant moment. Not for this novel, but for the timeline. For Asher himself. And I’m excited about what this will end up meaning for him.

Hudson Motley has no experience of much of anything, but he’s a different kind of city kid than Asher. More vulnerable and more honest. And he says he’s a writer, which doesn’t seem immediately useful when it comes to food production quotas.

I really like how Hudson apologizes for “saying something wrong”. Hud will one day be famous for his writings, in a future story. But he has to write them first.

Lincoln Shannick is equal parts cocky and confident. He seems to have the gift of the gab, and presents himself as earnest and invested in whoever he’s speaking to, but it feels inauthentic and superficial at times. Like he would drop you like a hot potato if something better happened along. A spoiler for another story: Link will never make it to Toronto.

Who would you choose to live with you, and why?

The Box is (perhaps obviously) based on the concept of a large battery charged by the various renewables. I know I’ve seen plans for a “municipal” scale battery system, as a contingency against power outages, but when I was writing this back in 2020 and 2021, I was only extrapolating the idea of an individual residential system. Rural power supplies have been notoriously unreliable in comparison to urban systems. Too many trees near power lines, I suppose. My area had a pretty bad tornado a few years ago, and (ironically) since all those weakened trees came down en masse, there have been fewer outages.

Sidebar:

This is a particularly ironic comment, considering that Sunday, the day I planned to post this Behind The Scenes story for Chapter 3, we are in the middle (not near the end of) an impressive ice storm that has me without power all day, and using precious laptop battery to “get caught up” on all the things I should have done on Sunday, March 30, 2025 in the real universe. The outage is impressive in its scope and duration. More reason to produce electricity at your residence!

End of sidebar

Bill gives us an overview of the current political situation, and of the new space race between the ISA (International Space Agency) and NASA.

The USA and Canada have each fractured [MEMO: these creative decisions were all made in 2020], but with no obvious aftereffects of any civil war.

Cascadia is the “Left Coast”. USNE is the United States of New England, but includes the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, as well as at least the southern parts of Ontario.

What about Quebec? Isolated and isolationist, a francophone fortress surrounded by anglophone animosity.

British Columbia is independent but not part of Cascadia. Alberta is independent but not part of the new rump USA. And the rest of Canada is still calling itself Canada: the territories, Newfoundland (probably without Labrador, which I expect has been annexed by Quebec), Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and all of Northern Ontario as far south as Sudbury and Algonquin Park.

Bill’s daydreams about space travel match my own. I grew up on science fiction. I always assumed that humanity’s reach into space would be inevitable and imminent. For years I adored Elon Musk for his tech, for his “big picture” ideals of making humanity “multiplanetary”, and for his talk of Mars. Sadly, in our world Musk has devolved into a Trumpist nutjob, while in the Hindsight Universe he has at the very least remained linked to both Texas and the Republicans.

More interesting than Elon, though, is how the ISA gathered together, even as the USA fell apart. NASA is still run and funded by the new rump USA, in partnership with Musk. But all the parts of Canada, along with Cascadia, USNE, Europe, and others, have merged their space agencies into a valid competitor.

At this point (with many 21st Century developments not well defined in the Hindsight Universe) it isn’t clear to me where India, China, and Russia fall, in particular, in this new era of space races. Japan seems a likely partner with ISA, but China is likely to be opposed. Perhaps Russia and China have their own set of co-operations. And perhaps that means India, in opposition to China, would cleave towards the ISA too? Or even to NASA? In either case, we might see three main parties to the space race.

The one that is most relevant for the Hindsight story so far is ISA and its Lunar Base. Did you notice the hint, previously?

In the kitchen, Bill is leaning towards Link, while Brian is voting for Hud. Their conversation is heated, or pointed, at times, but not much progress is made until the end.

“It’s better than the alternative. Or have you forgotten?”

This is intended as foreshadowing. The instability of the 2020s should be enough to make 2038 hold tight to stability, no matter what. I wanted to hint at just how bad things got, and how, in 2038, if the bad times are mentioned at all, it is like this, in cryptic terms, with specifics avoided, perhaps because they are still too painful to bring fully to mind.

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