What is this?
solarshades.club is the newsletter of author and futurist Andrew Dana Hudson, publishing for free once a month. It’s the best way to keep in touch with his/my work and ideas.
Who’s ADH?
I’m a speculative fiction author, sustainability researcher, and futurist. My stories have appeared in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, Analog, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and more. I also occasionally publish essays, such as in venues like Jacobin, and collaborate on scientific papers.
In 2016 my story “Sunshine State” won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest, and in 2017 another story of mine was runner up in the Kaleidoscope Writing The Future Contest. My 2015 essay “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk” has helped define and grow the “solarpunk” subgenre. I’m an SFWA member and part of the cursed 2020/2022 class of the Clarion Workshop.
Find most of my work on my website here.
For literary business/rights enquiries, please contact Reeves Hamilton at Vertical Ink Agency. Futurist business and everything else can come to me through this page.
My first book is Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”
My next book is Absence, a cosmic mystery forthcoming from Soho Press.
I have a master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University, where I am a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination. I have previously worked in journalism, political consulting, and healthcare innovation. My research, partnering with institutions like Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, uses speculative fiction to explore the entwined social and technical dynamics of future scenarios, particularly the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization and climate repair.
What’s with the name?
solarshades is a solarpunk riff on Mirrorshades, a 1986 cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling. It’s also the title of a story of mine. Several years ago @thejaymo picked up the domain solarshades.club and has kindly let me use it for this newsletter.
And the tagline?
I saw the phrase “the crossroads of this brazen age” in a letter sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory in the early 20th century, part of an exhibition at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. I used the same tagline for my Medium account, where you can read a few previous essays.
What exactly am I going to get?
A monthly newsletter with essays mostly swirling around the nexus of the future and speculative fiction, along with updates on what I’ve been doing and where my work has appeared.
“But what are you going to talk about? Gimme some topics!” Well, all our omnipresent jackpotting crises: climate change, AI, pandemic, capitalism, American politics, epistemic collapse, and Online. Also our treacherous paths out: renewable energy, climate repair, left organizing, worker power, prefigurative counterculture, and (again) Online. And glimpses of a better world we might build: socialism, solarpunk, multispecies civilization. Plus I’ll often share art I like and notions I have about books and fiction.
The Future is just a way of making sense of the world. It’s nothing but what we make of it. Let’s go.
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Here’s a picture of a melting glacier:
