Novel set in the mountains of CATALONIA
A dark but ultimately positive dystopian thriller, set largely in TASMANIA
21st January 2026
The Hope by Paul E Hardisty, a dark but ultimately positive Dystopian thriller set largely in Tasmania.
The Hope is the third book in Paul E Hardisty’s excellently reviewed series, The Forcing Trilogy. The first two books (both in the TripFiction database) are The Forcing and The Descent. Each book goes back and forth in time, but together they cover the period from the late 2020s through to the early 2080s. The Hope is set in 2082 with a fair amount of looking back…
The late 2020s start with populist US President Bragg massively exploiting the world’s natural resources, making his cronies ever richer, and driving the world’s population into climate change induced wars, poverty and hunger. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Feel familiar? Then the young and the idealistic rise up: they have had enough. They take power and then blame the older generation for all the woes of the world. They ship great numbers off to parched desert camps in the south of the country – where they fester. Some manage to escape and set off to supposedly safer parts of the world.
One such escapee family is led by ‘Teacher’, a Canadian school master. The Descent (both a sequel and a prequel to The Forcing) chronicles their perilous journey in a sailing boat down the coast of South America and over the southern ocean to a desolated Australia where they eventually settle and start to build a new life. But all is not well. Fighter drones attack them and kidnap a young girl… They speculate where in the world she may have been taken and set off to rescue her in another extremely dangerous journey. Eventually (at the start of The Hope, the third book) they are settled in Hobart, Tasmania. They live, with many other unfortunates, just outside the gates of a most luxurious Palace complex which is the home of the young leader of Alpha Omega a cult who now control much of the world. The chasm between the ostentatious richness and tech savviness of the inside and the poverty and desperation of the outside is extreme. Very few on the outside can ever hope to get in. On the outside books are banned so that no one can learn from the richness of history and literature. Medical facilities are virtually non existent.
A large part of The Hope is the story of the family’s next generation efforts to plot and overthrow the regime.
The Hope is an excellently thought through and well written book. Yes, of course it is fiction – as, indeed, is the whole trilogy – but day by day we see the world heading in the direction portrayed. It is scary. Paul E Hardisty is not just an excellent writer, he is also an acknowledged expert on climate change and the impact it could have on the world. He writes from knowledge and conviction.
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