Andrew Dana Hudson: Our Shared Storm

300 West Camelback Road,Phoenix AZ 85013

29 April, 2022

Description

Limited number of free tickets available. You can also support Changing Hands by purchasing the book below. Speculative fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson discusses his book, five interlocking novelettes exploring the possible realities of our climate future. ABOUT THE BOOK 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. 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 various books and anthologies. His nonfiction writing has appeared in Slate, among others.