Had a random idea that could evolve into a sequel down the line!
The major change to the City on a Hill scenario would be a world where the Shatter doesn't happen at all, resulting in a system where Reform and the Republicans fuse instead to devolve back to a two party system. In universe it'd be seen as an unlikely contrivance but what are double-blind what ifs for?I had a random idea for my Power Without Knowledge TL and I'm so busy with that I'll likely never get to this so I'll lay it out here. As you may or may not know, that TL serves as a worldbuilding thread for a novel I've been tinkering with called Oubliette. The timeline itself is divided into an alternate history section (going from the ~1980s to present) and a future history section (set in the 2190s), to better map out a novel bifurcated between a 2020 election bildungsroman and a futuristic neonoir thing. Anyway, as a capitulation to my need to flesh out every random detail I came up with an idea for an in-universe novel, City on a Hill, as a work of uchronia and metafiction describing a universe where a Cosmicist revolution in America succeeded instead of failing as it did in the backstory of Power Without Knowledge.
My random intrusive thought was to do a TL presenting that scenario (as in a defictionalization of City on a Hill) interspersed with a point set further in the future than my novel. Aside from the fact that the idea of a TL that's a DBWI for another TL sounds like lots of fun and it gives me a chance to explore changes to the future only hinted by Oubliette, it also creates interesting implications for the novel, since the frame narrative is that the anonymous "author" of it (writing in the future) is claiming to merely be compiling the journals of Daniel Sutter, founder of Cosmicism and dead more than a century, that nonetheless are perfectly tracking with lived reality in the future history portion. Is the author a fraud or was Sutter a prophet (or a madman)?
In my wildest self-flagellating fantasy it would coalesce into a sequel to Oubliette called Ultimatum, interspersing epistolary and prose portions from City on a Hill (a blend inspired by Reds!) with a purely prose portion revolving around a random Antarctic citizen trying to adapt it into a TV series to celebrate it's 150th anniversary while falling down the rabbit hole exploring the true authorship of Oubliette, all while a new and more militant Cosmicism is building for the final war on the surviving kyriarchal powers. A sequel where the original novel is a work of fiction, revolving around a character exploring it while trying to adapt a work that's fictional in both. It's quite a lot and it'll likely never go anywhere but the idea haunts me 😅
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