Welcome to the club.

Notes from the crossroads of this brazen age.

What is this?

solarshades.club is the newsletter of author and futurist Andrew Dana Hudson, publishing for free most every other Sunday. Maybe one day it will be more than that (a club), but for now it’s the best way to keep in touch with my work and ideas.

Who’s ADH?

I’m a speculative fiction author, sustainability researcher, and narrative strategist. My stories have appeared in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and more. My fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and longlisted for the BSFA. 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 a member of the cursed 2020 class of the Clarion Workshop. Find most of my work on my website here.

My first book (in English), Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, is out April 2022 from Fordham University 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. I also serve as editor-in-chief of Holum Press, which publishes Oasis, a Phoenix-based journal of anticapitalist thought, and as co-director of the Phoenix Workers Alliance, which organizes for worker power in Arizona.

What’s with the name?

solarshades 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 essays.

What exactly am I going to get?

A fortnightly newsletter with some updates on what I’ve been doing and where my work has appeared, along with highlights from my writing and research and time online, occasional longer takes. I’m going to try to keep it short, but I know from watching others that putting out a regular newsletter comes with temptation to mission creep.

“But what are you going to talk about? Gimme some topics!” Well, all our omnipresent jackpotting crises: climate change, pandemic, capitalism, American politics, epistemic collapse, and Online. Also our treacherous paths out: renewable energy, carbon removal, left organizing, worker power, prefigurative counterculture, and (again) Online. And glimpses of a better world we might build: socialism, solarpunk, multispecies civilization.

The Future is just a way of making sense of the world. It’s nothing but what we make of it. Let’s go.

Thanks for subscribing. Here’s a picture of a melting glacier.