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Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures Kindle Edition

by Andrew Dana Hudson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 21 ratings
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Through speculative fiction, five interlocking novelettes explore the possible realities of our climate future.

What is the future of our climate? Given that our summers now regularly feature Arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and “100-year” storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Combining fiction and nonfiction and employing speculative tools for scholarly purposes, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five possible outcomes dependent upon our actions today.

Written by speculative-fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson, Our Shared Storm features five overlapping fictions to employ a futurist technique called “scenarios thinking.” Rather than try to predict how history will unfold—picking one out of many unpredictable and contingent branching paths—it instead creates a set of futures that represent major trends or counterposed possibilities, based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios known as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).

The setting is the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them—and human society—in each alternate universe. These five scenarios highlight the political, economic, and cultural possibilities of futures where investments in climate adaptation and mitigation promised today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet.

Our Shared Storm is an experiment in deploying practice-based research methods to explore the opportunities and challenges of using climate fiction to engage scientific and academic frameworks.

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  1. Print length
    208 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
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  4. Publisher
    Fordham University Press
  5. Publication date
    April 5, 2022
  6. File size
    4733 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Andrew Dana Hudson's Our Shared Storm is a fascinating thought-experiment in imagining worlds to come. Through a set of common characters kaleidoscopically revealed, readers are granted perspectival narrative access to a skein of political, cultural, and philosophical views that, along with their attendant actions, will shape the planet for worse―or, perhaps, better.---Christopher Schaberg, author of Searching for the Anthropocene

Hudson’s innovative and exciting publication is, simultaneously, a consideration of the relationship between climate fiction and climate policy, a highly readable and teachable set of climate stories, and a critical intervention in what climate fiction is capable of achieving in the ‘real’ world.---Adeline Johns-Putra, Professor of Literature, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

. . . fans of William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson will savor this thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action. ― Publishers Weekly

Hudson has found a way to strike together all the various facets of our rapidly changing climate future, sparking stories that are by turns, and often all at once, ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful. He is the face of this new movement in science fiction, and we’re lucky to have him.---Kim Stanley Robinson

It is clear from Our Shared Storm’s narrative arcs and Hudson’s conclusion that he tries to reserve some optimism for the future and the potential role that cli-fi can serve in helping others imagine not only possibilities but also the kinds of politics and large-scale social changes that might have to happen to get there. . . From our current moment, this seems like a distant possibility, but it is certainly a future worth aspiring to. ― H-Net Reviews

About the Author

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative-fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and narrative strategist. His stories have appeared in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and more, as well as in various books and anthologies. His nonfiction writing has appeared in Slate, among others.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B099NSDWJM
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fordham University Press; 1st edition (April 5, 2022)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 5, 2022
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4733 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 21 ratings

About the author

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Andrew Dana Hudson

Andrew Dana Hudson

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Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and political organizer. He is a fellow at the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination, as well as an associate editor of Oasis, a journal of anti-capitalist thought in the desert. His fiction won the 2016 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest and was runner up in the Writing the Future Health Sci-Fi contest. His writing has also appeared in Slate, Terraform, Little Blue Marble, Grist and more. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
21 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

mykl-s
4.0 out of 5 stars The Good and Bad News about Climate Action, or its Lack
Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2022
Andrew Dana Hudson's excellent tale of five possible climate outcomes is an ambitious project, both complex and simple. He calls it speculative fiction, which he discusses in an Afterword, and also includes an Introduction explaining some of his process of writing it, and how it is structured.
It seems complex because the five stories (or chapters or novellas) are based on different models defined by the real-world series of international yearly meetings, called COPs, where diplomats, scientists, business leaders, and other concerned groups discuss how to deal with climate problems.
What makes the book seem simple is Hudson's stories, each a very different scenario of what the COP meetup could be like in 2054, depending on climate action or inaction in the previous thirty years or so. Many groups are mentioned, but there are just four main characters and only a few others named. Each character, Noah, Saga, Diya, and Luis are the same in each story, though changed by circumstances into different but recognizable people.
There is much explaining of the science and politics of climate change, mostly done with dialog. But that's a given for this kind of fiction.
Each of the five outcomes seems possible, each comes with problems. Some are a lot better than others, but I could believe each one. A worthwhile read.
2 people found this helpful
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Ariel Beery
5.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious and beautiful work of speculative fiction
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2022
Verified Purchase
Given the magnitude of the challenges heading our way, it is often hard to remember that the future has not yet been written. Our Shared Storm is an excellent and important exploration of the scenarios we may find ourselves in, and has deeply influenced how I think about the choices we can make as citizens, as professionals, as leaders, as organizers, as activists for a world we would like to live in. Well done - I highly recommend everyone read this book.
7 people found this helpful
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Michael Burnam-fink
5.0 out of 5 stars A Kaleidoscope into the Future
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2022
Everyone knows the world is falling apart.

We just don’t like to talk about it.

But what if we did talk about climate change? What if we stopped being paralyzed by the immensity of the problem, the multifaceted slow-motion catastrophe that everyone is responsible for, and nobody is accountable for? Decarbonization and any associated global political change are famously wicked problems, with manifold uncertainties and high costs, but climate change and how we deal with it is the story of the 21st century. And for all that climate change is the story, there are not enough stories about climate change.

Most climate fiction remains resolutely Delugist in orientation. In Oryx and Crake, The Windup Girl, or Don’t Look Up the core message is the sins of industrial civilization will finally overwhelm a weak and corrupt society. Out of the seeds of the devastation, a handful of survivors will rebuild, climate absolution paid for in gigadeaths. The kind of story about climate change is an apocalyptic fantasy, a re-inscription of Christian mythology into a modern context. It can make for a fine horror story, but it's facile, boring, and it’s a lie. If we’ve learned one thing about the apocalypse the past few years, there will not be angelic trumpets and letters of fire in the sky. You’ll just have to keep going to work, even as the sky rains blood.

Our Shared Storm is climate fiction done right. It’s a serious piece of futurism inspired by the latest IPCC scenarios and ethnography at COP24 (Conference of the Parties, the major UN climate conference) in Krakow in 2018. It’s also such good storytelling that I could not put it down, and stayed up far past a sensible bedtime to finish it in one gulp.

The stories are centered around COP60 in 2054, held in Buenos Aires. With a bit of literary and and futurological sleight of hand, Hudson holds constant the basic plot of the conference being hit with a torrential “neverstorm”, and the characters of Noah, Saga, Luis, and Diya, and let’s the world shift around them to show the five official IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios. I’ll confess to skepticism reading the introduction, but this is very much not the same story five times. Shifts in point of view and central dramatic tension along with the state of the world, make each timeline its own unique experience, and I was excited to see what in the characters remained fixed and what changed.

The stories trace an arc, from the business as usual scenario of diplomatic horse-trading over reparations for losses against investments in the future, to a wild party of fossil-fueled development and venture-disaster-capitalism, to stark inequality between those deemed useful and worthy of survival and the restive excess population, to a world of conflict and collapse, where a handful of scientists attempt to record the climate catastrophe like monks protecting the treasures of antiquity from Visigoths, to finally a sustainable utopia, where the major choice is how much to invest in decarbonization how quickly. It’s a tour from a world very much like our own, to ones much worse, and finally one where things are, well, not perfect, but apocalypse canceled. And even in the scenarios where things are bad, life goes on. “The collapse” can only been in retrospect. For those living in it, it’s just another day.

Our Shared Storm makes bold promises in the introduction, and accomplishes all of them with verve. First, these are good short stories, some of the more well-crafted speculative fiction I’ve read in quite a while. An academic work always has the threat of being too didactic, getting lost in abstract ideas and teachable moments, rather than story-telling. Our Shared Storm never loses the bubble that these stories are about human beings, not planetary systems. Second, this is a serious piece of scholarship, grounded in the best estimates we have, which successfully translates the bland bureaucratese of an IPCC report into the richly textured sensation of the future. And third, this is a methodological advance in narrative foresight, with the conceit of the same characters and events but different settings. I’ve done work in this field (Burnam-Fink, 2015, “Creating narrative scenarios: Science fiction prototype at Emerge”, Futures), and there’s a lot of theory but precious little successful practice.

Our Shared Storm is an impressive debut: Provocative, imaginative, and even inspiring. Hudson is a talent to watch.
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Top reviews from other countries

C.R.
5.0 out of 5 stars Let’s build it
Reviewed in Japan on April 18, 2022
Verified Purchase
Very well crafted and a joy to read. Until you notice that four futures already exist today, and the one we need to strive for doesn’t… and how much more the characters, grown dear over the course of the book, can be.
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