Brown wrote this story in the early 1990s, a period of great social and political change in the United States. For example, personal computers and everyday use of the Internet were becoming more commonplace. By the early 1990s, the number of deaths from AIDS began increasing at an alarming rate, and calls became louder for more efforts to combat the disease.

In the international arena, in November 1989, thousands of East Germans stormed the Berlin Wall, a symbol of communist control and power for nearly thirty years. This launched a nearly worldwide rejection of communism as a state political philosophy; and throughout the early 1990s, numerous Soviet-controlled countries, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, began shedding their communist leaders and experimenting with democratic elections and increasingly capitalistic economies.

Concern for the environment grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in various pieces of legislation designed to clean...