All of a sudden, pub date is a few weeks month away! Absence: A Novel drops May 5th from Soho Press. It’s a speculative detective story that called “The Leftovers meets Fargo.”

This month we were blessed with a wonderful starred (!) review from Publishers Weekly:

“Hudson (Our Shared Storm) gives a skillful metaphysical twist to a tale of apocalyptic horror in this strikingly original novel. Its setting is a near-future America devastated by “popping” . . . The thoroughness with which Hudson imagines how individuals and society would have to rewire themselves to contend with this bizarre phenomenon lends his tale impressive philosophical heft.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

You can get it wherever books or ebooks are sold (i.e. Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, your local bookstore). There’s also an audiobook edition (Audible, Apple Books, Kobo). And as a lover of libraries, I’d very much appreciate if folks could put in requests for their local libraries to acquire a copy for everyone to enjoy.

I’ll also be on tour, talking about the book with some really smart people. Here’s the current schedule:

• April 27, 7pm, Tempe @ Changing Hands w/ Matt Bell (Note the Tempe location; in previous newsletters I mistakenly put it in Phoenix.)

• May 6, 7pm, Scottsdale @ The Poisoned Pen Bookstore w/ Chloe Jensen (watch the stream)

• May 14, 6:30pm, Brooklyn @ Lofty Pigeon Books w/ Jinwoo Chong

• May 26, St. Louis, Left Bank Books w/ Scott Phillips

• July 2, San Diego, Mysterious Galaxy w/ Jac Jemc

If you’re a bookstore, festival, or con and want me to come do an event with you, please contact Soho Press publicist Alex Wilcox (awillcox@sohopress.com). Same goes for press inquiries about the book.

New Fiction: “Dad Died on Discord”

I have a flash piece out today: “Dad Died on Discord” in Lightspeed Magazine. It’s also on Lightspeed’s podcast, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Here’s a snippet:

When we moved Dad to the care facility, his only complaint was the wifi. “Laggy,” he called it when he was having a good day. “Fucking piece of shit,” he called it the rest of the time.

At first I was relieved. I’d been worried that he’d bristle at the cramped room, like a zoo animal pacing its enclosure in a sad documentary. But he never said a word about the bedsit quarters or the unfamiliar, ever-churning staff. He didn’t mind the food, which was prescription and bland, delivered from the AllMart pharmacy (though once management caught him drone-dashing tacos in through the open window). He never complained, as long as the wifi was working and he could sit up gaming in his railed hospital bed. When the wifi was down, however, he’d spit and rage, sulk and mutter, throw his food on the floor and his silverware at the nurses. Civil disobedience tactics from the bad old days.

Sometimes when I finish reading a book, I’ll try to write a fictional response. Just a thousand words or so trying out some technique the author uses or seeing what I have to say about the themes or ideas or because a book annoyed me and I want a way to vent. Sometimes these don’t go anywhere, but often this ends up being very generative. For instance, I wrote the opening of “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” in response to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (not an endorsement). A crucial story a character tells in Absence emerged from responding to Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

I wrote “Dad Died on Discord” after reading Something I Might Say by local AZ author Stephanie Austin. This funny-sad memoir about Austin coping with the slow death of her father and then grandmother — the latter during the covid lockdowns, so they had to visit her deathbed from outside the window — got me thinking about how I and my fellow millennials will fare when we get to the nursing home. I sat down to write a response, and this story poured out of me in one sitting.

While everyone of every age has adapted to living online, wielding smartphones, navigating social media, there’s a pretty clear divide between those generations who grew up before video games and those who grew up after. We don’t think of gaming as an activity 80+ year olds are interested in (beyond bingo, checkers, etc.), but that’s because gaming culture hasn’t been around that long. In another four or five decades, millennials will be elderly, and I don’t imagine we’ll give up our consoles and controllers.

After all, we’re already moving into our 40s and we haven’t grown out of gaming yet. Instead gaming has grown up with us, becoming more elaborate, more adult, more sophisticated as an artistic, storytelling, and experience-generating medium. I mean just look at these games C surveyed in her most recent Cosmic Mystery Club newsletter.

And games are a medium I (mostly) understand. I already feel somewhat alienated by the gen Z cultures of short form vertical video, but I can pick up and play most any video game. Not all millennials are like that, of course; I have non-gamer friends who struggle with two-stick navigation. But millions of us now have a shared literacy around the iterated conventions of the FPS, the RPG, the roguelite, the metroidvania, et al. Games will become even more culturally important as the Boomers pass on and the gaming generations move into political and cultural dominance. (Will AOC be the first gamer president??)

Will this be a permanent ratchet? I don’t know. This story is narrated by an avid-and-elderly gamer’s adult son, who grew up into an aversion to gaming culture the same way I can’t stand the blare of commercials on broadcast TV. The 18yo students I teach are already frustrated with the tech-mediated world they were forced into. What about the kids being born now, who are either iPad babies or raised by parents determined to keep them away from screens? There’s a chaotically swinging pendulum.

Personally, I take comfort in the idea that when I’m old, I’ll still be gaming. Exploring digital worlds when I no longer want to travel, jumping and running when my body no longer agrees to perform those maneuvers. And hopefully I’ll be able to game with people. Discord is far from a perfect medium, but chatting with far-flung friends while sharing an interactive experience like a Magic: The Gathering draft or fighting a Silksong boss has become a facet of my social life I enjoy immensely. I like to think that some of my buddies — who already gather in voice channels titled “Old Men Complaining” or “Screaming Adults” — will still be gaming together decades from now, just like those old guys you see who meet at the bar every week, year after year, as long as they can.

This story is special to me. There’s touches of autofiction in it, though warped, repurposed, passed through the prism of a younger generation trying to understand their predecessor’s experience. It’s also lowkey a solarpunk story, set in a world of UBI, AllMart, five thousand-person dance troupes, and a vast migrating solar maintenance workforce. It’s very short, but packed with little details I’m very proud of. Give it a read.

There are institutions that nudge people into particular visions of elderity, and children who have ideas of what’s best for their parents, but in the end every generation has to figure out for themselves what it means to be old. My parents have become master gardeners and voracious readers — even though they sometimes get stuck scrolling like the rest of us. I hope to follow in their footsteps, but I also hope I’ll get to keep experiencing the particular delights and rushes of games, which I’ve been taking pleasure in and meaning from for some thirty-odd years. Give me another thirty, another sixty. Let me game until I drop. Take the controller gently from my cold, dead hand.

Art Tour: The Gateway / Thanatos Wave

Still thinking a lot about my visit to the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore last month. This here is an incredibly evocative piece of surrealism/Lovecraftian horror, Thanatos Wave by Maura Holden. Higher up is The Gateway by Antar Mikos, which one needs the red-and-blue 3D glasses provided in the gallery to appreciate fully. Both are part of the “Fantastic Realities” exhibit of sci-fi-esque art, which runs until September.

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ADH: Welcome back to our month-long, two-person book club in public. Your interlocutors are myself, speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson (preorder my upcoming novel Absence here), and Lizzie Wade, a Mexico City-based journalist and author of the book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures and The Antiquarian newsletter. The last two weeks, we discussed the first half of French author Laurent Binet’s fascinating book Civilizations: A Novel (translated into English by Sam Taylor), which featured errant Vikings spreading germs, steel, and horses throughout the Americas, Christopher Columbus’s swift defeat at the hands of well armed Cubans, and the Inca emperor Atahualpa discovering Europe and making a splash in the fractious politics of this “New World.” This week, our final installment, we’ll cover the rest of the book, which sees Europe remade — politically, religiously, agriculturally — by wealthy colonizers from across the Ocean Sea.

There’s a lot in this second half of the book: various conquests and political maneuverings and marriages and assassinations; epistolary exchanges between Erasmus and Thomas More; the Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun and other new legal doctrines; invasions by Mexican pirates in league with England; and eventually the death of Atahualpa in Florence at the hands of Lorenzo de Medici. The novel concludes with a coda section following the adventures of Don Quixote author Miguel Cervantes (along with a few other contemporary notables) across the vastly altered landscape of mid-late-1500s Europe.

So rather than try to cover all that in order, let’s just popcorn around. Lizzie — what caught your eye?

Lizzie: Not only does this section cover a lot of ground, it includes so many different formats. There’s the More-Erasmus letters (in which we find out Henry VIII converts to the religion of the Sun in order to simply have multiple wives, lol) and this world’s Ninety-Five Theses that you mention, but also other letters between Higuénamota and Atahualpa about the Mexica invasion; excerpts from an epic poem called The Incades based, I think, on the Portuguese epic of exploration and discovery called The Lusiads; and the whole last Cervantes section (which frankly confused me so let’s come back to that).

The legal documents and structural (!) changes Atahualpa makes to his new empire mostly sound…really good? He fully embraces his conquest allies (the previously outcast Moors, conversos, witches, etc); replaces taxes, rents, and the remnants of feudalism with periodic state labor requirements; and introduces new agricultural technology to make Spain more prosperous than ever. These policies give us a better look at the inner workings of the Inca empire than Atahualpa’s flight from the Andes did.

The Inca empire ran on the relocation of people and the centralized redistribution of resources, or at least that’s been the traditional archaeological and historical understanding of it. The Andes had a long history of political authorities using feasts to collect and redistribute resources. The Inca empire perhaps took this to a more authoritarian place than its predecessors, and it certainly had a wider reach. Imperial roads ran throughout the Andes and connected communities over vast distances. People from all over the place were brought to work at Machu Picchu and presumably other imperial estates. Entire communities could be relocated for the empire’s benefit, and perhaps to undermine any resistance they might have been able to mount at home. (The Spanish empire later employed the forced migration strategy of “reducciones” to break up Indigenous communities.) Corvée labor on state projects was mandated. The bodies of sacrificed children are found, still frozen, on mountaintops far from where they grew up.

But compared to the feudal inequality of Europe, which Atahualpa and company consider to be an inexplicably terrible political strategy, Inca-style (mostly) benevolent dictatorship comes off as almost progressive. Atahualpa doesn’t really do extractive colonialism either, mostly because Europe is so poor compared to Tawantinsuyu — what is there to extract? Or perhaps it just seems like Inca conquest is preferable because we live in a world where all the structural consequences of European feudalism + extractive colonialism have been allowed to play out almost unchecked. What would happen if the structural consequences of the now globalized Inca empire accumulated over centuries? (Is this what the Cervantes section is supposed to show us?)

I also want to ask a more basic question, speaking of all the different formats: Who is the narrator of the larger Atahualpa section? First person occasionally intrudes, like when the narrator says “I have before me, annotated in Atahualpa’s own hand [the Twelve Articles of the Alsatian Peasantry]” (pg 191). Who is telling the story here? Is it supposed to make us question the third person, “objective” telling of the Inca arrival and conquest? Can we trust anything we’ve read up until now?

ADH: I really appreciated those occasional breaks into the narrator’s personal world. They hint at all this being conveyed as a lecture by a more contemporary historian or chronicler, who has gathered up exhibits like documents or paintings to support this telling of events. They also remind me a lot of one of Binet’s previous books HHhH, sort of metafictional novelisation of the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during WW2. (The title stands for “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.”) That book is told from the perspective of someone trying to write about these events, doing a bunch of research, comparing sources, having feelings about the characters, weighing how the story should be told. I think Binet is keen to remind us that history is constructed, built out of documents and artifacts, yes, but also out of the assumptions, agendas, norms, and grievances of the people doing the telling. Which is also one of the things Alternate History in general is so good at playing with.

I totally agree that Atahualpa’s reforms are generally an improvement on the feudal systems of the day. His agricultural policies aren’t just about taxes and labor but also include introducing crops from the Four Quarters, some of which, like corn and papas (potatoes), also became popular after contact in our timeline, but others, such as the highly nutritious quinoa, never caught on as civilizational staples. Meanwhile sheep were slaughtered, the landscapes they’d grazed bare turned back into land for growing crops. Some of these chapters that describe the sweeping results of Inca rule are so jam-packed full of little tidbits that I wish the book was actually a wiki page, so I could dive down into the details of, say, the elevation of Copernicus for his theory of heliocentric astronomy or Chalco Chimac’s hunt for Jesuit spies.

It’s interesting to consider whether the Inca’s land and agricultural reforms would end up blunting the impacts of the Price Revolution that, in our timeline, took place as Spain flooded Western Europe with American gold and silver, causing massive inflation that nearly collapsed the Spanish monarchy. Even though the Inca empire didn’t run on currency in the same way, Atahualpa recognized the utility of coinage and had Huascar send over lots of Inca gold with which to buy favor from various segments of the European aristocracy. But his way of dealing with the common folk seems much more of a direct distribution model of food, land, even two alpacas gifted to every peasant on their wedding day. Could we imagine this leading to a modern world in which basic needs are decommodified?

Anyway, it’s the need to turn Inca gold into legal tender that leads to Atahualpa dealing with the Fuggers in Germany, and eventually coming into contact with Luther. Binet’s depiction of Luther is pretty unflattering, painting him, in this later part of his life, as primarily obsessed with hating Jews more than actual theology or statecraft. As a Protestant preacher’s kid, this was way outside the understanding I’d grown up with of Luther as the great church reformer. Still, I think the depiction is well deserved, since Luther was extremely antisemitic, publishing a book blatantly titled On the Jews and Their Lies. Some scholars say he paved the way for the German antisemitism that led to the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Atahualpa sort of needs Luther’s blessing to win over the protestant German princes and continue his ascent to power. But the Fuggers also want him to kill Luther. In the end, we get the 95 Theses of the Sun, a really fascinating section that sort of tries to navigate and parse the clashing and melding of the Inca religion with Christianity. It covers mapping the trinity onto the Sun, Moon, and Thunder (can’t forget about Freydís spreading the cult of Thor all those centuries ago), the evils of indulgences, the rights of the poor, the ages of the world, quite a lot! But hey, the Reformation was a period in which doctrine was up for debate, as opposed to settled by institutional actors. Luther is enraged and in the ensuing riots is captured and dismembered by angry peasants. After which, Atahualpa finally becomes Holy Roman Emperor.

Lizzie: Luther comes off so badly in this book! I was also struck by his characterization as small-minded, petty, selfish, and unreasonable (in addition to antisemitic), as opposed to the stately, adaptable, and often generous Atahualpa. It strikes me as perhaps not all that “alternate” of a history in this case; anyone who feels driven to tear apart 1000+ year old religious doctrine and capable of replacing it with something **he wrote** was probably pretty unpleasant to be around. But perhaps I’m not giving Binet’s imagination enough credit here, now that the story is more situated in European history, about which we’re used to knowing all the details, or at least assuming it’s possible to know all the details with enough research.

That “wiki” feeling perhaps explains why I felt a bit bogged down by the second half of Atahualpa’s section. I admire Binet’s ability to evoke a sensation of believable historical density — it really does feel like he could spin a different novel out of almost every sentence — but I can’t say he made me care more about the marriages and machinations of his Alternate History Habsburgs than I do about the real ones. (Although there’s another parallel between Charles Quint’s brother and Holy Roman Emperor in exile Ferdinand and a series of Inca emperors in exile that resisted the Spanish conquest for 40 years.)

This sense of encroaching tedium is the point, however, as Atahualpa has now firmly lost his first mover advantage. His strategies become more and more bounded by preexisting relationships and expectations; he’s remade the board, so he can’t turn it over anymore. But someone else still can: the invading Mexica army, led by Cuauhtémoc (who, in our timeline, was the last Aztec emperor, appointed during the Spanish-Aztec war after the deaths of Moctezuma and his brother Cuitláhuac). This part was thrilling, with built-in suspense as Higuénamota and Atahualpa exchange letters they’re not sure will reach the other in time, or ever. In the end, Atahualpa betrays his long-time French allies and joins forces with the Mexica, to bring Mesoamerican riches into the Cuba-Spain trade route.

As an Aztec obsessive, I was disappointed with how little we learn about their politics, culture, religion, and goals as compared to what we now know about the Inca or 16th century Europe. It’s all about human sacrifice with them in this book, as it usually (and unfairly) is. Those scenes were so over the top, bordering on offensive, but I’ll admit they also made me laugh with something approaching delight. There’s a barely alternate version of our history in which Cortés is sacrificed in Tenochtitlan, and I enjoyed seeing it enacted on the king of France at the Louvre. Or is this part supposed to read as horrifying, and I’m just too Aztec-pilled to recognize it?

ADH: I totally hear you about the somewhat over the top depiction of the Aztec, though it is funny that they built their human sacrifice pyramid in the Louvre courtyard, where today sits a big glass version. Higuénamota even mentions its “harmonious proportions.” Maybe this is a hint from Binet (who is French) that here he’s resonating with future French history, perhaps the violence of the Terror echoing back through time.

For me the big takeaway from the arrival on the scene of the Mexicans is that Binet is trying to parallel the careless audacity with which, in our timeline, Europeans divvied up the world. I think all the time of that scene in Shōgun when Blackthorn explains how the Spanish and Portuguese signed a treaty dividing up rights to claim and colonize the New World, and the look on the faces of the Japanese characters who, probably rightfully, view themselves as sitting at the top of one of the planet’s most sophisticated societies. Such a dehumanizing way to view the world, cutting it up like a cake to split between squabbling siblings, with no care at all for the millions of people living there.

As in our timeline when the shoes of colonialism were on the other foot, the dividing up of Europe between the Inca and the Mexicans had little to do with the needs and desires of the colonized peoples and everything to do with ensuring peace back home. In the end, for all his reforms to benefit the marginalized, Atahualpa still cares more about his original empire, the Four Quarters. One wonders how this plays out long term, if this toxic dynamic leads to a sort of Great Game that extends across the planet, treating places like India, Africa, China, and Japan like chess pieces. Will the Inca be better at recognizing the humanity of people in those places? Or will competition with the Mexicans pressure them to set such concerns aside?

To be honest I don’t find the death of Atahualpa that interesting. He goes to Italy and hangs out with Michaelangelo and decides he wants to bed his sister, Quisepe Sisa, who is married to Lorenzo de Medici. Lorenzo in turn plots the Inca’s demise. Atahualpa is killed, but Quispe Sisa stifles the energy of this would-be republican revolution with a rousing speech to the Florentine crowd. The lineage of the Sapa Inca and the power of his generals seems like it will continue as a driving force of Europe’s future. The section is fine, but kind of an arbitrary end to a great character, which, I suppose, is probably the point.

One thing to note about the Italy section is that Binet did enough research on this region and era to write a whole other novel, Perspective(s), an epistolary mystery featuring art and scandal and murder and Michaelangelo. I read it last year and liked it okay, though it didn’t blow me away like Civilizations.

After this, we turn to probably the oddest section of the book, a solid 35 pages following the (mis)adventures of Miguel de Cervantes, driven by various dangers and impulses and contingencies around the world the Inca (and Aztecs) have made. Cervantes, of course, is (in our timeline, and possibly still in this one, who knows) the author of the famous novel Don Quixote. We meet some interesting characters along the way, like Doménikos “El Greco” Theotokópoulos, one of the great standout figures of the Spanish Renaissance. There’s a sense of the world still continuing to unfold, irrevocably changed by this contact of civilizations. Armies and navies are clashing, and we get a glimpse of papal scheming (the Pope not really being a major figure in the Chronicle of Atahualpa). I love the conceit of it, but the whole thing kind of washes over me.

Thoughts on the end of the book, and, I guess, the book as a whole?

Lizzie: I appreciate wanting to give a sense of “the world still continuing to unfold” and the medium- to long-term consequences of Atahualpa’s conquest, but it would have worked better for me with a bigger time jump. As it is, it’s just a few decades; Lorenzo and Quispe Sisa’s son is ruling Florence. It’s not long enough to see any satisfying reversals or surprises. There’s still religious strife and state violence in the Fifth Quarter, but did we really expect there not to be, despite the 21st-century appeal of Atahualpa’s reforms and the Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun?

Going back to the Louvre echoes, what if we got to see this timeline’s version of the French Revolution, which could be an anti-colonial revolt against foreign Aztec rule, led by the descendants of the sacrificed nobility? Or what if we’d stayed in the 16th century but gone back to Cusco, or to Tenochtitlan, to see how becoming colonial capitals changes those places and the people who live there? Or what if we started this section with Cervantes landing in Cuba, rather than finishing the book there?

Mostly this section made me want to revisit Don Quixote. I read pieces of it in long-ago college classes, and even that unfairly tiny glimpse was enough to know that it’s an all-time banger. So funny and so postmodern, in all the best ways; not only was it the first novel, it somehow contains everything the novel would become and is still becoming. So I understand Binet’s desire to riff on it, and to assure us that it will still exist in this timeline, possibly as an even better version of what it could be in ours.

But of course “better” is a tricky word to use about history, or alternate history. Civilizations isn’t trying to argue that an Inca conquest of Europe would have led to a global utopia. If anything, as you say about the Inca and Mexica arbitrarily dividing up Europe, it shows that empire and colonialism are always mostly dark sides, no matter who’s doing the conquering. How consequences play out over centuries is never inevitable from the outset, or even logical (despite our attempts to look back and make them so), and there will always be features about where we end up that we wish were different.

What I appreciate most about Civilizations, then, isn’t the exact details of the alternate history it offers, but how it returns complexity and humanity to the genre of the colonial conquest story. Everyone, on every side, was a complicated person muddling through an incredible, unprecedented situation. Our version of colonialism strives to make us forget that truth, and in one way I’m sad it’s so much easier to see it in fiction than real history. But of course, that’s why we have fiction! To use our imaginations in a safe place, and then maybe learn how to use it in less safe ones.

ADH: The earliest known work of counterfactual history was written in the first century BC by Livy in his treatise on Roman history, Ab Urbe Condita Libri. While discussing the 4th Century BC, Livy offers his opinion on the apparently oft-debated question of how Alexander the Great would have fared against Rome, and in particular his contemporaries leading Rome’s military, had he lived to turn his conquests to Europe. Something about that question is way more interesting to me than simply contemplating Alexander’s biography.

I think alternate history fiction has a way of making history come alive. I’ll admit, I’ve not always been a huge history buff (though that’s changing as I get older), in part because there’s nothing to be done about the past. We can strive for justice, for understanding or recognition, but we can’t change what’s happened. For most of my life I’ve used the speculative and The Future/futures as a lens through which to try to make sense of the world, of how to derive meaning from a human life. When I let myself ask “what if?” about the past, that static series of events suddenly becomes dynamic. Choices and constraints have weight. Historical actors feel like they have agency. It gives me a vantage from which to consider the normative questions that I’ve long been preoccupied with, what ought to have happened, and, failing that, what should or at least could happen going forward.

Thank you everyone for joining us for this multi-week discussion. If you made it this far, please subscribe to both our newsletters, jump in the comments to share your own thoughts about AH, or pass this on to a history-loving friend. We’d love this to be more than a two-person book club.

Absence: A Novel comes out May 5th!

If you like the idea of using a speculative lens to make sense of the world and our search for meaning, than you should check out my upcoming novel! Absence comes out May 5th in print or ebook, as well as audiobook.

Book Tour

More dates are locking in for the Absence Book Tour! Here’s where I’ll be:

• April 27, Phoenix, Changing Hands w/ Matt Bell

• May 6, Scottsdale, Poison Pen w/ Hayden Casey

• May 26, St. Louis, Left Bank Books w/ Scott Phillips

• July 2, San Diego, Mysterious Galaxy w/ Jac Jemc

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Art Tour: Stars Over Ce:dagi Wahia

ADH: Welcome back to our month-long, two-person book club in public. Your interlocutors are myself, speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson (preorder my upcoming novel Absence here), and Lizzie Wade, a Mexico City-based journalist and author of the book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures and The Antiquarian newsletter. Last week we discussed the first two parts of French author Laurent Binet’s fascinating book Civilizations: A Novel (translated into English by Sam Taylor), which featured errant Vikings spreading germs, steel, and horses throughout the Americas and then Christopher Columbus’s swift defeat at the hands of well armed Cubans. This week we turn our attention to the central figure of the book, the Inca emperor Atahualpa. Spoilers ahead.

In our timeline, Atahualpa was briefly the ruler of the vast Inca empire after winning a civil war against his half-brother Huascar, only to be ambushed and captured by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1532. The Spanish executed him a year later. It’s a shocking story of a centuries-old political order torn down by a small group of ruthless insurgents.

In Binet’s alternate version, the conquistadors never arrive. The smallpox epidemic, which killed Atahualpa’s father Huayna Capac and his original heir Ninan Cuyochi, was over centuries ago. Instead, they are struck down in an altercation with a red-headed traveler (presumably a descendant of Freydís Eiríksdóttir). Huascar and Atahualpa go on to have their civil war, which sees the latter fleeing north with the former in pursuit. In a journey off the map that somewhat mirrors Freydís’s trip south, Atahualpa and his retinue cross to North America, then craft boats and rafts and launch themselves into the Caribbean.

They land in Cuba, where they are given asylum by the Taínos. They also find out about guns and hear the story of the strange men that had arrived from across the ocean-sea, four decades earlier. With only grim prospects back home, Atahualpa is inspired to refurbish the two rotting Spanish ships on the beach, and build a third, larger vessel, and sail to the east with his generals, servants, llamas, and so forth, as well as the Cuban princess Higuénamota, who grew up chatting with the prisoner Columbus.

I’m so impressed by Binet’s ability to situate us in the sophisticated political and cultural perspective of the Inca here. I imagine it took a lot of research to get right, and it pays off in shaping how we read the contact encounters to come. Lizzie, what did you think of the highly contingent start of Atahualpa’s journey?

Lizzie: One of the many ways structural explanations/excuses for colonialism shape our vision of the past is that we tend to see contact as a story of difference. Technological difference, immunological difference, cultural difference, political difference, economic difference, and eventually racial difference—for 500 years, we’ve been taught that difference was the deciding factor. But what’s actually amazing about contact is how similar everyone was. To a smallpox virus, there was no difference between a European body and an Indigenous body (only bodies that had been exposed to the virus before and bodies that hadn’t, both of which could fall into any other category). The religions were mutually comprehensible as such and quickly began to intertwine. And any political or social organization one side of the world had developed, the other had too—including, crucially to this story, empire.

Atahualpa’s journey north allows for an economical but evocative exploration of both the power and weaknesses of empire, which foreshadows how the Inca emperor will behave in Europe—he’s not afraid of a big swing that changes the rules of the game, like burning Quito or capturing Charles Quint—and also how empire always contains its own resistance and potential downfall. In the case of the Inca, that involves both heirs leaving their seats of power to pursue a personal civil war, as well as passing mention to the damage that unhappily subjugated groups are able to inflict in a time of chaos. Atahualpa’s forces pay the price for past conquest when they are attacked by the Canaris on the way to Quito, but later he’ll learn to wield an empire’s history of oppression in his favor in Spain.

In Binet’s version of the story, Atahualpa was always somewhat of an outsider, too, more connected to Quito than the Inca capital Cusco. I like this vision of some of history’s most consequential actors being people who have become detached from their expected contexts. Where do you go once you’re off the map, and who can you become in a place you don’t belong, because you don’t belong?

Atahualpa goes to Lisbon, where his ships land shortly after a devastating earthquake. The city and surrounding countryside have already been thrown into chaos, so the arrival of strangers from across the Ocean Sea is initially the least of anyone’s worries. It’s a nod to how contact was not an immediate crisis on its own, but rather intersected with all sorts of other preexisting ones (like the Huascar-Atahualpa civil war in our timeline). It amplified some problems, suppressed others, and generally injected even more chaos into whatever was already unpredictable.

The Inca retinue installs itself in a monastery, and the Quitonians start to learn about a strange religion of “the nailed god.” Higuénamota only wears the most necessary clothes (namely Atahualpa’s “bat fur coat,” which I deeply wish I could try on), and again we get an inversion of the sexualized, powerless woman translator—here, her nudity allows her to take charge of situations and relationships because it’s so unsettling to the monks and European public at large, even though she can only sort of understand Portuguese. But when the king of Portugal eventually comes to meet the newcomers, Higuénamota realizes she can understand his Castilian wife, Catalina. And so Atahualpa and company head to Spain.

ADH: Well said! These early scenes after the Inca arrive in Europe are super interesting to me for a couple reasons. First, there really was an earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon in 1531, which killed some 30,000 people. As an author, I’m always amazed at how the real world and history are just packed full of wild and highly symbolic events and coincidences that would be too strange for fiction if I made them up but can provide a scaffold of meaning to guide a story. Binet does this really well, using the existing tapestry of life in the 1530s to weave his story into. Sometimes these are even literal tapestries, in the form of references to future Titian paintings depicting some moment of Atahualpa’s journey.

Second, we see very quickly how odd and arbitrary the logics and norms of Christian Europe are to people who are complete outsiders to the Abrahamic tradition. The “nailed god” has no more significance to them than the Inca cult of mummies would have had to one of our timeline’s conquistadors. They see the Inquisition burn a man at the stake and don’t understand why people would worship a god who demands such brutal sacrifices. They don’t get why the locals, particularly monks, are so freaked out by female nudity. They have to piece together the mythology and the violent divisions between the sects of the Abrahamic religions from scraps.

You’d think this would put them at a disadvantage, and in some ways it does, but, because they don’t share Christian pieties, it also allows them to act orthogonally, to think outside the box. At one point, after they find out that the local Inquisition plans to arrest them, the Inca decide to massacre the whole town of Toledo, sparing only those who do not make the sign of the cross.

Binet’s work here points to what I think of as a first mover advantage. Sort of the opposite of a home field advantage, applied to these first contact scenarios. Everyone in Europe is constrained by social ties, by cultural and religious norms, by obligations to the web of feudal allegiances in which every king and lord in Europe is cousin or in-law to every other. Everyone has an economy to think of. Everyone knows how militarily or politically strong everyone else is, and so can choose to pray only on weaker foes. Everyone, that is, except Atahualpa and the Quitonians. They’re sort of playing checkers, while everyone else is playing chess. It might seem like a less sophisticated game, but it means that their pieces can hop across the board, breaking the expected rules.

Which of course is exactly the situation the European conquistadors found themselves in when invading the Indigenous societies of the Americas. Probably this was key to their success.

I think we can most clearly see these parallels Binet is drawing in the capture of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V (referred to in the text as Charles Quint), from the midst of his whole huge army, by Atahualpa’s tiny band. It’s a scene that mirrors the ambush at Cajamarca where, in our history, Francisco Pizarro takes Atahualpa hostage, thus precipitating the collapse of the Inca empire. In both battles, the foreigners are vastly outnumbered. In both battles, the foreigners rush for the monarch on horseback. (I love the line on page 113 about how “The Quitonians’ ancient equestrian tradition had made them exceptional horsemen.” Exactly the sort of thing that makes Alternate History so fun.) In both battles, the local troops’ focus on protecting their king made them less effective at actually defeating the foreigners. In both battles, the leader of the insurgents — Pizarro in our timeline, Atahualpa in Binet’s — has to take extreme action to prevent his own men from killing the enemy monarch, because their only hope of survival is taking him alive. In both cases, the plan that is “so crazy it just might work” works.

What do you think of my “first mover advantage” theory? And of Binet’s historical mirroring?

Lizzie: There is certainly power in being able to turn over the board because you either don’t understand or don’t care about the rules of the game everyone else thought they were playing. I’m very interested to hear about these historical parallels with the battle of Cajamara, because I know a lot more about the Spanish-Aztec war in Mexico (some of whose characters we’ll meet in the next installment!) than I know about the Spanish-Inca war in Peru.

Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been mulling over an idea I’m calling “the random white guy theory of history.” The colonial “heroes” we tend to think of as the protagonists of contact—Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, the early Virginia and Plymouth colonists—weren’t anyone special. They weren’t more clever, more sophisticated, or even necessarily more adventurous than their contemporaries. Cortés and Pizarro didn’t take down empires because they were generational military geniuses who flawlessly executed brilliant strategies. Their power came from creating, and taking advantage of, chaos—sometimes on purpose, often by accident. (I’ve been particularly inspired by the work of historian Matthew Restall here, whose Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest is a must-read, and whose latest is The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus.)

But the Random White Guys also had a force even more powerful than chaos on their side. They had allies, drawn from the Mexica and Inca empires’ subjugated and marginalized peoples. In Mexico, for example, the republic of Tlaxcallan had resisted incorporation by the Aztecs for a century before Europeans arrived. The Tlaxcalteca saw the foreigners as supporting players or even pawns in their generations-long political struggle. And it paid off for them, at least for a while. Tlaxcallan continued to exist for centuries after Aztec Tenochtitlan fell, reporting directly to the Spanish crown instead of being broken up into oppressive and exploitative encomiendas.

Atahualpa is anything but a random Inca, but he does start to take advantage of the potential allies on offer in Europe when he recruits Spain’s “conversos, Moors, witches, bigamists, fanatics and Lutherans” (pg 93) to his side after sparing them in Toledo. When we learn about colonial history, it can be hard to understand why the Tlaxcalteca and so many others allied with the Europeans. Looking back at the contact period through the funhouse mirror of our current racial categories and the myth of inevitability, it seems like they were acting against their own interests; in Mexican history, the Tlaxcalteca (like the translator Malintzin) are often remembered as traitors. But when Binet layers the same dynamics over sixteenth century Europe, whose outsiders and outcasts we’re already familiar with and more likely to be sympathetic to, it’s much easier to see why Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and those in danger of being accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition would race to ally themselves with a first mover like Atahualpa.

ADH: Yes, such victims of empire, and particularly the insane zealotry of the Spanish Inquisition, have already joined Atahualpa’s band when Charles besieges the Quitonians at Salamanca and ends up captured. There’s a brief period of limbo in which the Inca (and their new followers) hold Charles hostage and move, surrounded by the Spanish army, to a Muslim-built fortress in Granada. Atahualpa very cannily (he’s studied Machiavelli at this point) allows Charles to reunite with his family, receive dignitaries, and basically continue running his empire, and in doing so the Inca come to learn at last about the politics, geography, and religions of the continent—including the prominence of gold and silver in the economy.

This section features one of my favorite passages in the book, beginning at the bottom of page 121, which details the nature of Christian faith, and its distinctions from Islam and Judaism, as understood by the newcomers: “Thus, all [the Christians’] actions were supposedly dictated by their desire to make up for the ingratitude that their ancestors had shown to their god when they tortured him and nailed him to a wooden cross at the top of the mountain in a distant land.” We also see Atahualpa start to soft launch one of his most impactful policy innovations: religious tolerance. He “suggested to Charles that he should enact a law authorising the different cults of practice throughout his kingdom, then simply add to that list the cult of the Sun” (meaning the main religion of the Inca).

Charles laughs, because of course in the 1500s the politics of Europe are all about the Reformation, the aftermath of the Crusades, the slow cracking of Catholic hegemony. And many Christians had, and still have, an eschatological mindset that put the saving of souls for the afterlife/end times above peace for the living. What was common sense to Atahualpa—tamp down on religious strife—is unthinkable for Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor. I’d like to think Atahualpa’s proposal would be common sense to us contemporary people too, but it’s hard to watch the insanity of the war with Iran and not feel that the urge to obliterate other religious cultures is alive and well in our leaders today.

Anyhow this odd period of rule-by-hostage eventually ends when Charles is injured during an escape attempt and dies.

Lizzie: I missed the Cajamarca parallel earlier, but here I saw a mirror between Charles Quint’s fate and the death of Aztec emperor Moctezuma in our timeline. In the book, the Quitonians hold Charles hostage for months in the Alhambra, where he technically continues his duties as the king of Spain, but with Atahualpa and his advisors making the real decisions. This is, more or less, what Cortés and other conquistadors claimed to have done with Moctezuma when they entered Tenochtitlan, although it seems clear in their own writings that Moctezuma had them in a gilded cage. The tables turned eight months in, when Pedro de Alvarado launched a surprise attack during a religious festival and massacred many members of the Aztec nobility. Like the book’s Toledo massacre, it was completely outside the rules everyone else thought they were playing by—arguably even Cortés, who was on the coast dealing with new arrivals from Cuba at the time.

In the chaotic aftermath of the Tenochtitlan massacre, the Spaniards actually did capture Moctezuma. The story goes that he went out on a rooftop to try to calm down the furious people below, and that a projectile launched from the crowd hit him in the head and killed him. I tend to agree with Restall, who argues in his book When Montezuma Met Cortés that the conquistadors murdered Moctezuma and used the city’s understandable panic and unrest to create a cover story. But the truth is, we’ll never really know what happened, or who threw the stone, or if there even was a stone. I don’t know if Binet was thinking of this incident when he wrote the scene of Charles Quint’s attempted escape from the Alhambra, in which he is struck down by an arquebus bullet fired by unknown hands. In the book, the Spaniards blame the Quitonians for their king’s death, but his loss is a disaster for Atahualpa and company. Without Charles Quint under their “care,” the Spaniards have no reason not to attack.

ADH: The Quitonians make a break for it, reduced once again to a fleeing band pursued by a mighty army. When all seems lost, Higuénamota returns from a secret mission with money and weapons from Huascar, and the tide turns. Suddenly Atahualpa isn’t just a random insurgent, but a politician backed by an intercontinental supply chain that gives him access to the might and gold of Tawantinsuyu. It’s one of the last moments of heightened contingency in the book. The rest, as we’ll discuss next week, is all about structure, and how Inca culture might reshape Europe if given the chance to colonize it.

For those reading along, our third and final book club discussion will cover the rest of the book!

Preorder Absence: An Audiobook!

If you like a speculative tale that cheekily flips aspects of our reality on their head, you should preorder my upcoming novel Absence — which will also be published as an audiobook! Narrated by Dan John Miller, produced by Recorded Books, and clocking in at just shy of 15 hours (really the sweet spot for speculative novels, imho), you can preorder it on Audible.

I listen to a ton of audiobooks, and so I’m really excited to have my novel come out in this format. If this is how you prefer to read your books, definitely check it out. It drops the same day as the paper book, May 5th!

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Book Tour

Dates are starting to shape up for the Absence Book Tour! More are coming, but here’s where I’ll currently be:

• April 27, Phoenix, Changing Hands w/ Matt Bell

• May 6, Scottsdale, Poison Pen w/ Hayden Casey

• July 2, San Diego, Mysterious Galaxy w/ Jac Jemc (shout out to this year’s Clarion Workshop, who I look forward to dropping in on)

More dates are coming, likely in May and June!

Art Tour: Prayer for Peace

In Baltimore last week I got the chance to visit the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM), a fascinating institution dedicated to the strange and compelling work of self-taught artists. A lot of striking works there, but this week I wanted to share a piece by Apache elder Judy Tallwing. Embedded in the painting are hundreds of beads.

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ADH: Hello and welcome to another collab post between myself, speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson (preorder my upcoming novel Absence here), and my friend Lizzie Wade, a Mexico City-based journalist and author of the book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures and The Antiquarian newsletter. Last year we shared our written conversation about “thermochauvinism,” a coinage of mine that we expanded into a broader concept of “thermocolonialism.” Along the way, I got Lizzie to check out one of my favorite books I’ve read this decade, Civilizations: A Novel by the French author Laurent Binet (translated into English by Sam Taylor). Since this book is very much up both our alleys, we decided to have a sort of two-person book club in public about it.

(Readers, if you want to follow along, this first of three newsletters will cover the first two parts of the book, about the first fifty pages. We’ll be back next week with a discussion of the next ninety or so pages, and finish up with a part three that covers the rest of the book. And obviously, as C likes to say, spoilers ahead.)

Civilizations is an alternate history in which Freydís Eiríksdóttir leads a band of Norse settlers in Greenland on a long journey south, spreading germs, steel, and domesticated animals throughout the Americas. Centuries later, Christopher Columbus arrives in Cuba and quickly gets his ass kicked, dying a prisoner without ever returning to Spain. In the mid-1500s, amidst civil war with his brother, the Inca emperor Atahualpa flees to Cuba and learns the story of the people who came from across the ocean. Intrigued and without other prospects, Atahualpa sails east, landing in a Europe riven by the Inquisition and the Reformation. Through a series of unlikely but historically resonant events, Atahualpa conquers this “New World.”

I’ve read this book at least three times since I first picked it up in 2023, and I have a huge amount to say about it and the alternate history genre in general (my current novel project is AH). But for now I’ll pass it over. Lizzie, what did you think of Civilizations?

Lizzie: There is so much to talk about in this book! I loved, for the most part, the Viking section that opens the book. Freydís’s journey has a mythical quality, as she and her companions hop from Canada to the eastern U.S. (Virginia, maybe?) to Cuba to the Yucatán peninsula and finally to Peru and beyond, seeking a new home. The people they meet are often, but not always, generous, curious, and generally happy to have the newcomers around, until people start getting sick.

This section explores contact without colonialism, an alternate history possibility that endlessly fascinates me. Freydís and her companions are explorers but not conquerors, even though she eventually becomes a queen. Knowledge is traded on a more or less equal plane, and sometimes by accident, as when a pregnant mare is portentously left behind with the Maya of Chichén Itzá. Binet is clearly trying to create a situation in which the cultural, technological, and biological shocks of guns, germs, and steel are slowed down, spread out, and able to be absorbed by Indigenous Americans on their own terms. He presents the epidemics, especially, as an unavoidable tragedy, but when the germs aren’t being helped along by centuries of colonial violence and oppression, they result in prolonged circulation and acquired immunity, which eventually allows Atahualpa and his followers to arrive in Europe without the threat of disease hanging over their story (or at least no more than it hangs over anyone else’s story in the 16th century).

I thought this was artfully and convincingly done, but it also left me a bit troubled. I think the supposedly serendipitous importance of guns, germs, and steel has been way overstated as a distraction from the intentional, targeted devastation inflicted by colonial violence — which Indigenous communities nevertheless survived, and are still surviving. I guess I wanted an alternate history of the Inca conquest of Europe to not have to start with the assumed primacy of European technology and diseases, even as I really enjoyed Freydís’s journey and found its effects plausible. What was your reaction to the Viking section?

ADH: The Jared Diamond thing is so interesting. Binet has said that a line in Guns, Germs and Steel gave him the whole idea for the book, after visiting Lima and becoming fascinated by the story of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca. But of course, as you said, Diamond is widely criticized, particularly by Indigenous scholars, who I think are totally right. Viewing the genocide of the peoples of the New World as structural makes it seem inevitable and blameless, as opposed to a horrific series of political and ideological choices made by individuals and leaders who were never held accountable for their crimes.

So on the one hand that’s a mark against the core premise of the story. On the other hand, I think the novel actually serves as a great counterexample to the GGS thesis, for (as we’ll get to I’m sure) the Inca conquest of Europe that Binet depicts isn’t structural or inevitable either, but a highly contingent series of events driven by politics and ideas, strategic choices and personal relationships, and blind luck. This question of structure vs. contingency is, I think, all over the book, and all over the entire alternate history genre.

Lizzie: Structure vs. contingency is such a great way to phrase it. I lean hard into contingency when thinking about history, and especially colonial history, partly because I think it’s a more accurate description of how anything actually happens when humans are involved, but also partly because the structural hypothesis is terminally boring. Who wants to live in a world — or spend time imagining a world — in which everything was inevitable and how things are right now are exactly how they were always destined to be? Blech. That would repel me even if I thought how things are right now were great.

And Binet is definitely not doing that! Freydís’s journey feels delightfully contingent as the characters live through it, and its ultimate narrative purpose is to remove the relevance of the structural explanations that have taken over our historical imaginations in this timeline. I’m left with the impression that Binet had to meet his audience — and maybe himself — where we’re at with the GGS of it all in order to be able to write a book that ultimately rejects those kinds of pat explanations and invites us to accept as plausible a very different version of events. I can live with that!

ADH: I see your point about the inevitability implied by the structure side feeling boring and pat. For me, though, if everything is contingent — random events and arbitrary choices going back to the dawn of time — it’s hard to make sense of history or critique the present. After all, structure is not just guns, germs, and steel; it’s also ideologies, institutions, class struggle. Understanding these forces that shape our lives is key to changing power relations and economic systems for the better. Whether structure or contingency matters more is probably unknowable, because we can’t change the past. Only with alternate history, we kinda can, and that’s what makes AH so interesting to me as a tool for thinking about the world.

Anyway, back to Freydís. I appreciate her capital-S Saga for its wonderfully spare prose that mimics the style of the actual Vinland Sagas. And you’re right, there’s an odd kind of gentleness to the vikings’ journeys and encounters across what is to them a completely unknown land. You and I will never know what it means to be so off the map. They are a small band, on the run, with no ties or obligations back home they wish to keep or return to, which frees them to meet the various Indigenous peoples as equals that they can trade knowledge and integrate with.

Another good example of contact without (immediate) colonialism is in Kim Stanley Robinson’s big AH novel, The Years of Rice and Salt. In that book, Europeans are wiped out by the Black Death, and so the New World is discovered by a Chinese fleet swept out to sea that ends up briefly landing in California, and then in South America (again encountering the Inca). One sailor ends up sticking around and teaching the Miwok and other Indigenous peoples about scabbing as a way to fight the smallpox breaking out — again a nod to the primacy of the germs, but with disease as a problem to be mitigated rather than a weakness to exploit.

That gentleness in Saga of Freydís is such a contrast to the next section, the Journal of Christopher Columbus, which depicts Columbus landing in the Caribbean and instantly viewing the lands and people there as his to possess and gift to his patrons. Unlike Freydís, ties back home are all Columbus thinks about. His writing is addressed, in a super obsequious manner, to the Spanish crown, with whom he had brokered an elaborate financial scheme to fund his expedition. Again, all this is inspired by the style of Columbus’s actual journal of his first expedition.

Whenever I read this section I always think of Graeber’s analysis in Debt: The First 5,000 Years that colonizers like Cortéz were highly motivated toward reckless and immoral behavior by the debts they had accrued back home: “We are not dealing with a psychology of cold, calculating greed, but of a much more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and accumulate” (Graeber 318).

This is a part of the book where European history inflects, as Columbus is defeated by people in Cuba who, unlike the first few groups he met, have horses, iron-bladed axes, and military discipline. I always find this sequence of events somewhat unclear, probably because I don’t know enough about the pre-Columbian culture of the Caribbean. Why do some of the Indigenous people encountered have these capabilities, and others not? Regardless, it’s extremely satisfying to see Columbus have interactions in which he is at the mercy of the Taínos, rather than the other way around, to see him made into a captive translator, as he did to dozens of innocents he kidnapped.

What did you think of this section?

Lizzie: The difference between people who are tied to home (Columbus) and those who don’t have a home to look back to (Freydís) is an important one in Civilizations; it will come back with Atahualpa, whose initial position as an exile is what allows him to remake the world. Power comes from a person’s ability to literally keep going in the face of desperation and uncertainty, and to recognize when those hardships create opportunities, even unlikely ones.

Columbus doesn’t have that gift; he is the book’s least adventurous protagonist by far, perhaps because he’s so sure of what he’s after (claiming land, gold, and converts for Spain). He immediately starts plundering and kidnapping, but he’s soon outnumbered and outgunned, and it is satisfying to watch him lose everything. His ships are wrecked (but crucially, not destroyed), his men killed, and his dream of returning to Spain in glory dashed in every conceivable way. No one in Cuba is even particularly interested in where he came from, except for a little girl named Higuénamota, who becomes my favorite character. And yet he is writing to “Your Highnesses” until the very end, unable to absorb that his journey was meaningless — at least according to how he understood its aims — and he, already long forgotten.

Columbus’s ships are how Atahualpa eventually crosses the Ocean Sea, but the most significant part of his story is his brief friendship with young Higuénamota. She learns Spanish from their conversations, and she never forgets his tales of an unknown land far to the east. It’s her imagination that points the way for Atahualpa, and her abilities as a translator that make his rise to power possible. She is valued, powerful, and in control, which is the opposite of the image passed down to us of real colonial translators like Malintzin/la Malinche, the enslaved girl who translated for Cortés in Mexico and is now remembered as a sexualized traitor. Here, Columbus himself occupies the stereotypical Malinche role, of translation as passivity and humiliation, which opens the door for Higuénamota’s self-possession and fearlessness. I think the real Malintzin must have been just as brave and curious as Higuénamota, even though history rarely grants her any agency. I love how the book puts translators at the center of history rather than relegating them to supporting roles.

ADH: That’s it for part one! We’re finding we have enough to say about the book to do this in multiple newsletters, week by week. As I said above, if you want to follow along, next week we’ll start covering “The Chronicles of Atahualpa” that make up the bulk of the book, up through the chapter titled “Cádiz” which ends on page 138 in the English language hardback edition. Thanks for reading and thinking about this fascinating text with us!

Absence: A Novel Arriving May 5!

If you like books about the tender balance between structure and contingency that moves history, preorder my novel Absence, which comes out in less than two months from Soho Press.

I was away at AWP this week when a box of the actual book - hardback, jacket, and all - arrived. It looks great, with a back full of lovely blurbs. And a lovely new blurb just arrived this week from the incomparable Karen Joy Fowler:

“Hudson’s debut novel succeeds on every level – an original and compelling mystery, told with assurance, intelligence, craft, and all of it fueled by an extraordinary imagination.”
– Karen Joy Fowler

Book tour is starting to come together. I’ll be kicking things off in Phoenix with a pre-premier launch on Monday, April 27, 7pm at Changing Hands Bookstore. I’ll be talking about the book with my wonderful friend . If you are in the area, please come out!

Then on May 6th, I’ll be at Poison Pen in Scottsdale, signing and talking with another wonderful friend, Hayden Casey.

More should crystalize soon, most likely an NYC event in mid-May, and hopefully Bay Area and STL events and more later in the summer. If you read this newsletter and think we could turn out a crowd in your area, let me know!

Preorder your copy of Absence here or at your local bookstore!

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Art Tour: Truthiness

In Denver a few months ago, we saw a massive Andrea Carlson exhibit. It was the kind of show that makes you rush to the gift shop to buy the book version, which we did. Carlson describes herself as descended from Grand Portage Ojibwe and European settlers. Her kaleidoscopic mixed media works, like this one, seem to me to capture the chaotic, violent strangeness of American cultural landscapes and colonial history — and thus make a perfect companion to the above book club.

A few months ago, my good friend Jay and I caught up on Zoom, and we agreed that it was time to stop talking about the future.

Partly this is because we are at last surrounded by many of the 20th century’s most popular signifiers of futurity. Video calls are daily occurrences/annoyances. Robot Waymo cars roll up and down my block every few minutes. Biking across campus usually means swerving around little Starship delivery bots too. AI is omnipresent, appearing constantly on the news, in departmental emails, my students’ papers, in overheard conversations. Strange things are happening to the economy, to geopolitics, to human relationships. If you were writing a novel 70 or 50 or 25 or even 10 years ago and wanted to show-not-tell the reader that it took place in The Future, casually mentioning self-driving cars, delivery robots, AI girlfriends, and threats of a US invasion of Greenland would get you there pretty quick.

Of course, a lot of this stuff feels banal or even grotesque when experienced in real life. The arrival of futurity does not seem to come in on a tide that lifts all boats, but rather brings inequality, precarity, anxiety, and isolation. As I’ve often argued, high tech/low life sounds cool in theory, but most of us don’t get to be cyberpunk hackers or street samurai. Most of us are downtrodden cyberproles.

Many of these tech developments often seem to be pushed by their fans, funders, and creators because they signal futurity, rather than because they are actual useful or have real value. There is a kayfabe to the whole tech industry at the moment. I’ve read arguments that humanoid robot servants are not so much real products themselves but a kind of marketing strategy for much less humanoid factory automation robots. General purpose chatbots burn a lot of money, but they also put on display computational prowess that helps AI firms sell the more Normal TechnologyTM uses of LLMs and machine learning. Uses like replacing call center workers with chipper bot voices, replacing human software engineers with stables of “vibe coding” agents, and facially recognizing immigrants and dissidents for targeting by secret police.

The point is, these sorts of things are no longer a way to superficially signal that you are talking about The Future, because they now exist in the present. Space travel is still a sure bet signal of futurity, but, as we all know, space is dead. Until we develop new signifiers, telling stories about The Future/futures will be significantly harder and more finicky.

This future-present is also so damn weird. Yes, there’s the immense evil and stupidity steering the US government and the post-culture war discontent brewing in response. But there’s also an off-the-map feeling in tech, in education, in entertainment, in our brains and souls. The flows of money that keep our world semi-functional are now swirling through massive alien abstractions like the Nvidia gyre that are hard to understand using traditional economics or labor-value theory. It’s unclear to me whether those abstractions are bubbles or scams or just how the economy is now, some emergent property of an increasingly complex tangle of global systems.

Our current moment feels less like a set of trend lines that could be neatly extrapolated into various potential futures and more like a bundle of tensions that could each resolve one way or another at any moment.

That’s a hard vantage to make predictions from. I’ve found it difficult to write or even read futuristic sci-fi lately. Instead I’m working on alternate histories, alternate presents, post-rupture imaginaries that aren’t tied to a temporal trend line. That’s the same mindset that produced my soon-to-be-released novel Absence, which in my head takes place not in the near future but in a kind of eternal 2020.

There is one meaningful way in which I’ve seen people evoke The Future lately: as a site of restored rationality from which folks will shake their heads about the insanity of the present. Consider this post:

There have been a lot of posts like this, imagining how future people will compare gambling to lead paint, AI to cocaine, 2025 to 1933. It’s a way of saying both “we don’t know how bad it’s going to get” and also “how can we not see how bad it’s going to get?” Perhaps the most famous post of this type was Omar El Akkad’s now famous Gaza tweet-cum-manifesto One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

There’s a promise of catharsis here, even if it is, in a way, catharsis through humiliation. We want to be humiliated by the future, because that means this too shall pass. The insanity one day stops, the grownups are put back in charge, perhaps even a bit justice is meted out, however little or late. Humiliation means what we’ve done isn’t permanent, that we haven’t doomed our descendants with our bad choices. Humiliation is the hope that this isn’t the way everyone has to live forever, because we don’t particularly want to live this way right now.

Good sci-fi of course has always been more about the present than the past, but I think there is something uniquely contemporary about this retrospective approach. I used it myself in my recently published story “Pursuant to the Agreement,” which is framed as a collection of documents in a future museum exhibit, interspersed with commentary from a somewhat snarky curator who fills us in on what the authors of those documents didn’t know was coming.

So yes, the future is here, the future is weird, the future is shaking its head at us — or so we hope.

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Preorder Absence: A Novel (+Giveaway)

Feels wild to say it, but Absence: A Novel comes out in just over two months. Kirkus gave it a lovely review, calling it:

“A haunted story about unfinished lives, the persistence of hope, and the consequences of grief without end.” - Kirkus

The whole review offers a nice glimpse into the premise and themes of the book, so check it out if you don’t mind a bit of spoilers.

We’re getting the book tour squared away, and I should have an initial schedule to share sometime next month. I’ve also been alerted that, if you’re in the US, you can enter a giveaway on Goodreads to win one of 25 copies. The giveaway closes Feb. 26, so get in soon if you’re interested.

Or just give it a preorder. You can get it from pretty much any retailer, including your local bookshop.

Next Month: A Book Club

In March, I’ll be posting a multi-week book club discussion with my friend Lizzie Wade, who I collabed with for the Against Thermocolonialism post last year. We’ll be talking about Civilizations: A Novel by French author Laurent Binet (translated into English by Sam Taylor). This alternate history novel imagining the Inca conquest of Europe is one of my favorite books I’ve read this decade.

If you’d like to read along in advance of our discussion, that would be wonderful! We’ll be talking about the first two parts (about 50 pages) on 3/8, then about half of part three (up to about page 138 in the English language hardback edition) on 3/15, and hopefully wrap up the rest of the book on 3/22.

Regardless of whether or not you’ve read the book, I think it will be a really interesting discussion about how we understand history — and alternate history! So see you next month!

News, Reviews + Miscellany

• In Locus Magazine, Maria Haskins gave my story “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” a nice review, calling it “a hoot” that “finds just the right balance of satire, zany hijinks, and social commentary.”

• I was quoted in this cool writeup on solarpunk in Mother Jones by Clive Thompson, whom I talked to some months back.

• Publishers Weekly topped Absence in this list of upcoming speculative mysteries.

• I’ll be at AWP in Baltimore soon, March 4-7. If you’re going to be around, please reach out. I’d love to say hi!

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Art Tour: Neon Landscapes

I’ve featured local artist Aimee Ollinger before in this newsletter. After doing so, I ended up reaching out to Aimee, and she was gracious enough to invite us to come see her studio and learn about her process. They say you should never meet your heroes, but I absolutely recommend meeting artists you like. Usually they turn out to be kindred spirits in some way, and this was indeed the case here.

So of course we walked out with a few pieces, gifts from me to C and from C to me and from both of us to my dad. We’ve now gotten all of these works framed, including the trio of small, colorful landscapes above, which we had framed as a triptych.

These are very evocative to me of the mountains around Phoenix, the way they sit with the sky and the city and the desert, overflown by landing airplanes and lit up with radio towers. Now we just need to find the right place on our wall…

Way back in spring of 2024 — feels like ancient history now — I participated in a narrative hack-a-thon put on by my friends at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. The gist of a “narrative hack-a-thon” is that you get a bunch of interesting thinkers together, with various expertise, you team them up with SFF writers, and you have them brainstorm a sci-fi story on a particular topic or question. I’m an old hand at these, having done a couple with CSI on solar energy back in the deep beforetimes of 2018 and Jan. 2020, and then organizing four workshops about the Swedish energy transition with Luleå University of Technology in 2023. Just this week I facilitated a similar workshop on reimagining public goods. This one, however, broke the mold, for it wasn’t about the bright but complex future of renewables, but rather the messy, historically fraught question of what the US should do with its nuclear waste.

I didn’t know a ton about nuclear waste management (NWM) going into this workshop, but thankfully the workshop served as an excellent crash course. The question was about how we might create a consent-based siting process for a hypothetical “temporary storage facility” — basically a warehouse where sealed casks of spent fuel rods could be gathered from where they currently sit at active and decommissioned nuclear plants around the country, to await eventual disposal at an also-hypothetical permanent repository. That’s a lot of jargon and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. What it boils down to is: would you say yes to the government storing something potentially scary in or near your community? If you did say yes, did give your ‘consent,’ what would that consent mean? How long would it last? Could that consent be withdrawn or renegotiated by future generations?

My group got interested in that bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, and we devised a story, told in documents, about trying to keep such a facility going over decades — decades in which America experiences a profound political crisis that sees the breakup of the Union. Back in 2023 this “Great American Fracture” felt like a distant possibility. Today, seeing ICE thugs invade American cities and disputes between state/local governments and federal authorities over everything from tariffs to college curricula to whether it’s wrong to shoot an unarmed civilian in the face, this vision feels all too plausible.

The story I eventually wrote up is titled “Pursuant to the Agreement.” It’s an epistolary story, documents framed as a series of exhibits at a future Museum of the American Fracture. You can now read it in the book Our Radioactive Neighbors, edited by my colleagues Clark Miller, Ruth Wylie, and Joey Eschrich. The volume also includes stories by Justina Ireland, Carter Meland, and my friend and fellow solarpunk Sarena Ulibarri. This fiction is supplemented by about a hundred pages of essays explaining and exploring the mechanics of nuclear power, the history of NWM and siting policy, the complexities of seeking community consent. It’s all extremely thoughtful and informative. If you ever wanted to be able to impress your friends at dinner parties by mastering a grim and arcane but genuinely fascinating topic, well, this book could probably get you most of the way there!

There is also a really nifty supplemental facilitation guide featuring questions and activities that can be used to start conversations about the stories. Part of the role of the book, used in the larger 3CAZ series of community forums, is to help communities develop the imaginative capacities required to make hard collective decisions. Several of us involved in the book discussed all this on Tuesday, at an event capping off the whole 3CAZ project.

Here’s a snippet from “Pursuant,” from right around the middle of the story:

“Pursuant to the Agreement” sprawls across decades and generations and text genres. It features official documents, diplomatic communiques, text message conversations (see above), meeting transcripts, handwritten letters, and fuck-you emails, all held together with curator’s notes that give a 22nd century perspective on 21st century institutions, expectations, and foibles. It’s about trying to hold together a long-term project across an ever-shifting policy landscape and an ever-swinging political pendulum — in this case one swinging wildly enough to break its moorings and go careening off over the historical unprecedented horizon. Which, you know, relatable.

In the almost two years since we had the workshop, that pendulum swang has resulted in the phrase “consent-based siting” being stripped from some federal web pages. The preferred term now is “collaborative siting.” Apparently the word “consent” is triggering for the various bullies and rapists that set our nation’s agenda these days. There’s also been a notable SCOTUS ruling related to proposed interim storage sites in West Texas and New Mexico. It’s unclear whether an interim storage facility is actually that much closer to being built.

And probably we should build one. After all, none of the communities around where we currently store our spent fuel rods actually consented to that situation. All of them were promised that the waste from their nuclear plants would be moved to a permanent repository by now. It would be good to consolidate all that in-situ waste before the concrete casks get damaged by climate disasters and start leaking radioactive materials into the environment.

In many ways the fundamental issues when it comes to nuclear waste siting are not so different than those in siting carbon removal projects, which I’ve discussed before, or, for that matter, the huge AI data centers the Magnificently Sloppy Seven want to build all over. There are local burdens and histories and injustices to consider, balanced with notions of national or global or economic good. Some of those goods are more convincing or palpable or immediate than others. Same with the burdens. The goods are not always evenly distributed, nor are the burdens. It’s easy to feel like the whole thing is too swamped with nuance and knotted with human feeling to ever Do It Right — if you can even agree on what that means.

I think we’re at a moment when people are waking up to the reality that the future is not a stack of immaterial abstractions. It’s not in the cloud or the metaverse or the bodiless, agreeable text streams of chatbots. Or at least, not just there. Those abstractions must be brought into being by infrastructure in the real, material world, and that infrastructure has costs and complications. It uses energy and water and land, requires roads and labor, makes noise, has ripple effects on the food-energy-water-waste-compute nexus. Same for any material projects we might undertake, such as scrubbing the skies of carbon or burying other sorts of waste in the ground or building housing or high speed rail or yet more strip malls. We can do strange and futuristic things, but those things must be done somewhere, somewhen, and that means involving real people with real, far-from abstract lives.

Check out “Pursuant to the Agreement” and all the stories and essays in Our Radioactive Neighbors: Collaborative Imagination, Community Futures, and Nuclear Siting Practices.

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Preorder My Novel

And if you’d like to read more socially complex explorations of speculative political events, Absence: A Novel comes out May 5th! Get it from your local bookshop or preorder it via your preferred online retailer here.

If you don’t want to wait until May, you may be able to get an early look via Netgalley, if you’re a user there. Several readers have already left reviews of the novel at Goodreads, calling it…

• “a character-driven, slow-burn speculative mystery with lots of questions and not all the answers”

• “a clever story well told”

• “one of those books that will leave you guessing until the very end”

• “a great read to start the year!”

PREORDER NOW!

Art Tour: Becoming the Sea

Was in STL over the holidays and saw an amazing set of site-specific paintings by Anselm Kiefer at the SLAM. Truly pictures do not capture what it feels like to walk up to one of these, but hopefully this gives you some sense. Fiancée for scale.

1. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Red Grading Pen

You may recall my last post-semester dispatch about teaching first-year composition in the age of the AI homework machine. This post got more traffic than anything else I’ve published on here, thanks to a timely share on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. I wrote about the banalities of trying to police AI writing and the struggles to get students to look up from their screens, resolving to ban device use from my classrooms and retvrn to using pen and paper.

So, how did it go? For the most part, well. In the final week of each semester, I always ask students for feedback on my course design. This time nearly all of them said they appreciated the break from their heavily tech-mediated lives and course loads. Even the student who had been most ornery and resistant to the device policy early in the semester had come around, said it helped him focus. Many reported that they found handwriting a better way to gather their thoughts and take memorable notes and voted to keep the handwritten assignments. They enjoyed how I used the whiteboard more and had them stare at boring slides less. All were appreciative of being given readings as printed handouts instead of webpages or pdfs.

I (and my comment section) had worried that working with pen and paper would be totally foreign to today’s freshmen, that I wouldn’t be able to parse their handwriting. Both fears were unfounded. Most of them had still been doing some pen and paper work in high school, and (perhaps because of the death of cursive) mostly their handwriting was very readable. Frankly my pen and paper skills were rustier than theirs, having spent the last twenty years doing all my writing via laptop. I was the one who at first found it a strange change to prep my lessons in a notebook rather than on slides, whose handwriting got sloppy when marking up their papers. But I acclimated, and soon I found grading a stack of papers a much swifter and less annoying task than churning through speedgrader on Canvas — situated as the latter activity is within the distraction-filled medium of the browser or the iPad.

There were some difficulties to my analog approach. Students mostly kept laptops away, but phone use was devilishly hard to suppress. I had a few students who sometimes openly scrolled Reels during class, and calling them out on it made me feel like I was teaching middle school, not college. AirPods sometimes stayed in if I didn’t bug them about it, and I could never tell if students had just forgotten they were in their ears or if they were surreptitiously listening to music or podcasts during class. I didn’t want to be a cop, but I occasionally had to play that role, in part because a lone device user was visibly distracting to my other students and in part because they were distracting to me as I tried to teach.

When students are allowed to have their laptops out, however, we can all maintain the fiction that they are at least partly taking notes or examining the reading or checking Canvas, as opposed to texting, shopping, doing homework for their other classes, or watching (e)sports. (Not that I have always been clean of such sins even as a grad student. I have a vivid memory from undergrad of a journalism prof scolding me and my friends for our incessant mid-class typing to each other on gchat.) Without the screen between us, it was way easier to tell when a student was disengaged, bored, spacing out. Some would yawn, fidget, stretch, check the clock, stare vacantly, even doze off. Students in the back whispered to each other; apparently one pen-and-paper skill that hasn’t endured is that of passing paper notes. That was all a new challenge for me, and occasionally made teaching demoralizing and enervating.

Such behavior varied a lot between my sections. My 1:30pm class was by default pretty alert and engaged, and being packed into a relatively small classroom made it harder for students to get away with breaching our collective social contract. By the time we got to my 4:30pm class, with its more sprawling classroom, both students and I were tired and ready to go home, and they had the room to use their phones under the tables without bumping each other’s elbows. These differences were more palpable without devices in the mix, but I was also able to attune to their moods and needs better, adapting my teaching strategies between sections, getting the evening students up and moving more often to put comments down on the whiteboard.

So: a lot of pedagogical exploration and growth. I still caught a bunch of students using AI on typewritten assignments, and there were others that I didn’t catch, merely suspected. But on the whole a good teaching experience, for all of us.

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2. The Kids Are Not Okay (with Tech)

Probably the most striking part of this semester, however, was the theme of tech critique that ended up suffusing so many of our class conversations and so much of what my students wrote.

A solid chunk of my classes are devoted to discussion and analysis of various pieces of contemporary writing. For the first half of the course, I provide them with weekly “tabs” (a frame I borrowed from the excellent Today In Tabs newsletter, which admittedly makes less sense now that I’m usually printing these readings out). These include op-eds, longreads, book reviews, blog posts, podcasts, keynote videos, etc. Usually recent and topical, though for everyone’s sanity I try to avoid material that’s overtly partisan. I use these to give them examples of the kinds of writing they are being asked to do in class, to point out interesting and well-crafted sentences, and to expose them to the discourse that shapes contemporary culture.

In the second half of the course, these discussions continue, but I ask the students, in small groups, to provide the tabs, present on them, and lead the conversation. This semester nearly every article they chose was about the troubles and travails of our digitally mediated modern life.

There was the NYT podcast on AI’s impacts on education and the MIT study on ChatGPT-induced cognitive atrophy. There was this high schooler’s essay about struggling to get off her phone to pursue the hobbies she loved and this excellent New Yorker piece about the attention crisis. They talked about youth disengagement and screens in schools and maintaining friendships over text message and treating big tech like big tobacco. They debated if audiobooks count as reading and whether culture has come to a standstill. We spent most of one class period on our feet milling around after listening to a podcast about the dangers of “binge sitting.” That’s eleven out of twelve tabs we discussed across two sections. The single piece that didn’t clearly fit the theme was a Zadie Smith essay on essay writing, and I was pretty much the only one who really dug that.

Again, these were the articles they found and picked themselves to discuss with each other. The tabs I picked for them earlier in the semester occasionally touched on such topics but were just as often personal essays about friendship or telemarketing, gonzo journalism about dog shows, or chapters from this year’s ASU common read, Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein. I do think I primed the pump for them a bit with my own obvious interest in tech lash, but I don’t think their selections were all about pleasing teacher. This was what they wanted to talk about: social media and screentime and AI overuse. Several times I nudged the next group up to explore another topic, but usually they just found a different angle to address the same set of concerns. When it came time to pick one of the readings to write a response to for their final project, a huge portion of them chose to keep talking about tech.

These issues have come up before in previous semesters, but never with such overwhelming frequency and focus. I felt like they were constructing a syllabus for each other and me - Zoomer Tech Dilemmas 101. So it was fascinating to sit back and listen to them hash these questions out. These kids were mostly born the year the first iPhone dropped. They’ve never known a world without social media or smartphones. And yet they speak often about living through the sudden advent of “Technology” - by which they always mean digital devices and platforms; that an airplane or a nuclear power plant or an MRI machine might also be considered “technology” rarely crosses their mind. They aren’t always very articulate or clear-eyed about these circumstances they’ve grown up in, but they always have stuff to say about it.

That stuff is usually a mixture of frustration and defensiveness, along with anxiety about where Technology is going, a yearning for moderation, and a slight longing for the long-gone offline world. They’re scared about what this grand experiment we’ve run on them will mean for their adult prospects, but they also get annoyed by tech critics who don’t give due credit to the kinds of digital literacy they view themselves as having mastered. They see enshittification unfolding, but also they never really experienced the web before every inch was clogged with ads and paywalls and laced with dark patterns; as a result they can’t decide whether they should expect better. They agonize about doomscrolling on TikTok, but they also like that the endless flood of content means everyone has a chance to express themselves. They often say AI has a lot of valid uses, but don’t want students to be able to access chatbots until high school, maybe middle school at the earliest. They also unanimously claim they don’t think AI should be used to cheat, though I’ve found that a student expressing this opinion is no guarantee that they themselves won’t turn to AI cheating when they get stressed. They like the utility of social media, but wish it didn’t dominate their social lives. I’ve had a few students who apparently hoped that college would give them a chance to experience the kinds of friendships they’ve seen in, well, Friends, and then been disappointed to find that rushing a sorority or going to a frat party was still always mediated, still all about doing stuff on one’s phone.

There was a harsh undercurrent of recrimination in their discussions. Both of self and of others. What’s on your For You page, for instance, was the result of your choices most of all, not some mysterious algo, so don’t complain about the content you’re being fed. They have not yet learned how to be angry at big systems, so that energy curdles into guilt and shame. Sure, products like Instagram and ChatGPT are designed to be addictive by some of the smartest and best-funded people on the planet, but often students would say it’s still on the individual to not let themselves get sucked in. The Tyler,The Creator school of online governance is alive and well in Gen Z.

Probably the most moving sentiment I heard from them and read in their work was an acute concern for those generations even younger than themselves, Gen Alpha and so on. Zoomers see themselves as having gotten some unmediated childhood play, with core memories of just going outside and running around, climbing trees, etc. But they don’t see their younger siblings getting that same experience. They’re very concerned about iPad babies. Even a student who once bragged about regularly hitting twelve hours of screentime per day fretted about seeing his three-year-old cousin play Call of Duty on an unattended phone.

Of course when I hear this, I think, “Hey, that’s my line! Millennials are supposed to talk that way about you!” So perhaps every generation thinks of themselves as the last ones to have a foothold in the good, old, swept-away physical world. And like everything trends come in and out like the tide, the pendulum swings the other way, social manias are slowly moderated. Parents I know with babies and toddlers today are very keen not to let their kids be iPad babies. Many of my students reported that their schools had, in their senior year, implemented strict no-phone policies, including making students lock their phones in sealed pouches. (Enterprising teenagers bought magnetic keys online and unsealed their peers’ pouches for $5 a pop.) Data is piling up about how counterproductive school laptops and tablets are, and districts are starting to act accordingly. There’s every reason to think that we can and maybe even will mitigate and roll back some of the bad effects tech has had on young people over the last fifteen years.

But in the meantime it’s hard to shake the feeling that something has gone very amiss with this cohort now entering college, and that the students themselves are desperate to understand and articulate what that something is.

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3. Teaching in the Great Literacy Crisis

Part of that something is: many of them can’t write. My first semester teaching comp a few years ago, I had a student who simply couldn’t put together grammatically coherent sentences and clear thoughts. I fretted a great deal about whether or not I should pass him. Now I’ve become numb to this common occurrence. Ever since, I’ve had more and more students whose writing is not just weak but close to non-functional, and this semester was the worst yet.

Rules of grammar that were so drilled into me as to become second nature by high school either were never taught to many of these students or somehow didn’t take. Many have a solid vocabulary, but don’t piece it together right. Often they know this, and are frustrated by it. I carved out part of one period toward the end of the semester to ask them what they wish we’d covered and blitz through answers, and most of the questions they had were about sentence structure and proper use of punctuation. When I did my course design feedback, several students said they wished we’d spent more time learning grammar.

This is not normal for first-year composition, even at a big access-focused university like ASU. Comp textbooks are all about understanding genres and rhetorical situations and types of argument, using and citing sources, being a part of academic discourse. In the rhetoric textbook I used this year, writing clear and correct sentences is covered in two slim chapters way at the back, more as a reference, an afterthought. If I could do it all over again, I would have begun this semester covering those chapters in detail, hoping to catch up some of the students who are writing at remedial levels.

Even some students who are gung-ho for school, who are engaged in the class, who are maybe even in the honors college, are struggling with basic writing in a way that they weren’t just a couple years ago.

Many other educators have been sounding the alarm about recent and sudden drops in student literacy, particularly reading comprehension and stamina. I’ve been seeing that too, though I got into this game too recently to know a world in which college students could fully absorb and understand 30+ pages of reading. Part of the reason why I do the tab discussions is to model for them the practice of reading an article, understanding its points, appreciating its strengths, and critiquing its weaknesses. This is not a skill they find easy when it comes to text. They struggle to hold in their mind the various movements of argument within, say a New Yorker essay. I can’t imagine what it’s like to try to get them to read full books.

AI makes recognizing and dealing with the writing/reading crisis infinitely worse. Some students compensate for their poor writing skills by turning to LLMs, which masks the true extent of the problem. In a confusing twist, this also makes teachers like me suspicious of any writing that is too clean and correct, and I think some students who do their own work know this and are introducing a few glaring errors to “humanize” their writing, just like their peers do to sneak AI-generated essays past graders. It’s a counterproductive and miserable spiral all around.

These LLM products are arriving at the perfect time to both paper over and exacerbate a growing literacy crisis. I don’t know how many of my students were never taught phonics and instead were told to learn to read using the long-debunked “three cueing” method — basically teaching as literacy the strategies that illiterate people use to cope and pretend understanding — but I know it’s not zero. I keep thinking about the student Clay Shirky wrote about in the Chronicle of Higher Ed who used AI to graduate high school with a 3.4 GPA while being completely unable to read, turning himself into a walking Chinese room thought experiment. The bigger the gap between what students are capable of and the demands of college or, for that matter, the professional world, the more they will want to and need to turn to AI to compensate. Such ever increasing dependence on fundamentally grotesque and untrustworthy systems is a recipe for precipitous social decline, not to mention the destruction of higher education and generational confusion, disappointment, and anger when the hallucinatory bubble pops.

In order to disincentivize AI use, I switched to “grading process over product.” I broke projects into more steps that students earned completion points for without being judged on quality. Final revisions were worth fewer points, and I tweaked my rubrics so fewer of those points came from categories like “clarity” or “polish.” In general I think this was a good practice, but it also gave me fewer opportunities to signal to individual students that they needed to up their grammar game, maybe seek help from the writing center or my office hours. Assuming those remedies are enough when one has gotten this far without some fundamentals in place.

And most of those students whose writing I don’t consider college level passed my class, just as they passed through high school. I don’t know if that’s good or bad for the students themselves in the long run; hopefully they improved and will keep improving, even if they are behind. But it doesn’t seem like it bodes well for society, and it’s unpleasant for me, personally, to feel like being an educator means being part of an assembly line of buck-passers without a clear buck-stopping mechanism.

Not that I’m passing everyone. This semester I’m failing more students than ever I have before, even though my class, in my opinion, has only gotten easier. Most of them just didn’t attend enough and, against my advice, didn’t withdraw before the deadline. Some didn’t turn in a bunch of assignments, despite many check-ins by email and face-to-face urging them to get something in. Sometimes these latter students were still coming to class regularly, participating and staying engaged. Sometimes they were totally fine writers. They just didn’t show up or didn’t do the work. There’s always been one or two, but this semester it’s a half dozen — a startling jump from the last couple years.

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4. Welcome to the Wackpot...

The last few months, along with the articles my students found, my tabs were filling up with observations and takes about the decline of literacy, the struggles even elite institutions are having teaching the recent crops of college kids, and theories of the New American Dumbness. It’s grim out there!

So why is this happening now? Is it the phones? The brain rot content? The AI slop? The spoons-worth of microplastics in our brains? Is it the lingering impacts of the stultifying covid years and zoom school, or the multiple covid infections taking a hammer to our collective prefrontal cortex? Or, as I argued a few months ago, is it that the ever understood but rarely faced reality of unaddressed climate catastrophe has made millions give up, turn away, lose the plot? Is the cognitive decline trickling down from our insane, sundowning leaders, or trickling up from the content-entranced masses? Is it The Fascism?

In William Gibson’s time-communication novel The Peripheral, the high-tech hillbillies of the near future are separated from the higher-tech posh kleptocrats (and their servants) of the farther-future by a cataclysm called “The Jackpot.” We spend much of the book wondering what this disaster was that wiped out some 80% of the human population. A virus? An asteroid? A solar flare? A rogue AI? Nanotech gone mad?

The most memorable moment in the book is when Wilf explains to Flynne that, no, it wasn’t one single thing: it was a confluence. It was the climate getting worse and resistant disease spreading and tech acceleration and tremendous violence, all swirling together into an emergent, slow-moving global giga-disaster without clear beginning or end. On the other side, the decimated world is controlled by rich survivors, for whom the whole affair was both a bullet dodged and a dark Malthusian blessing. Probably we are already in The Jackpot now, Gibson suggests. Maybe we have been for 500 years.

That’s my theory about what’s happening to young people right now, too. It’s not one thing — it’s everything. It’s the covid years plus phones and social media plus ed grifters selling bunk curriculum plus No Child Left Behind plus the stupefying politics they’ve come of age around plus the AI slop now being shoved in their faces plus all the rest. Call it “The Wackpot”: an emergent generational crisis that may now coming to a head. Wack because most of the forces driving it are just so frustratingly dumb.

As worrisome as The Wackpot is, I had many students who were thoughtful and curious. They know something is wrong, and they’re intensely interested in figuring out a better way forward, even if they don’t yet have the frameworks to understand the systems that failed them.

And all these problems are solvable. We can return to working literacy pedagogy and get screens out of schools. We can pop the AI bubble and regulate social media as a public health concern. We can de-alienate and de-atomize. We can do right by the generations coming up, and offer educational remediation for the worst impacted.

I’ve been fiddling with a story that features an attention-span bootcamp. You sit and read War and Peace, and a drill instructor screams in your face if you check your phone. Maybe that’s dramatic, but I do think there will be demand for this kinda thing in the coming years. The changes I made to my teaching and classroom policies this semester feel like where everyone is headed, and more importantly seemed to be having a positive effect.

There’s an assumption that the young are rebellious and the old are complacent, but I don’t think that’s always true. When we are young, its very easy to accept the world, because we are powerless to change it and we don’t know how else it could be. When we come into adulthood, gain some measure of influence and mastery, and experience social change and change within our own lives, we have the opportunity to stop accepting, to develop analyses and push reforms. If enough other people come to similar conclusions, society can change quite rapidly and radically.

When I was eighteen, I don’t think I had a social critique as deeply felt as the one my students explored this semester. My politics were all over the place and didn’t start to coalesce until I sought to enter the workforce amid the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. These kids are coming into their grievances and frustrations much earlier. I, for one, am interested to see what they make of the world, when soon they get the chance.

Book Updates and Blurbs

If you liked that long essay about finding hope amid decline, may I interest you in a long cosmic mystery novel about the same?

This week we are officially sending Absence to press! It was so wild to hold the ARC in my hands at last — an object in the world, rather than a document I’ve been fiddling with for year on my computer. It’s beautiful inside and out, and I’m so stoked to see the hardcover edition that drops in May.

Due to the holidays and a backup at the printer, we had a somewhat abbreviated ARC reading period. Nonetheless some fantastic authors took the time to read and blurb it, for which I am eternally grateful. Here’s what a few folks had to say:

“A wild, inventive, and extraordinarily prescient novel, Andrew Dana Hudson’s Absence unspools a moody detective yarn that quickly vaults sky-high, weighing humankind’s slow numbing against daily horrors and faith’s struggle against the impossible. And yet most impressively, within its nightmare of spontaneous gradual depopulation, much is made clear of our species’ capacity for hope. There simply aren’t enough books like it.”
—Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You and Flux

“A moving, enthralling story, set in a fully realized, beautifully examined world. Don’t let this one get away.”
—Sara Gran, author of the Claire DeWitt novels and The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“Absence is fascinating, shiningly clever, and thought-provoking. A thriller wrapped in dystopian almost-horror wrapped in a perfect enigma, anchored by a grounded and methodic agent named Harvey Ellis. Brilliant!”
—Manda Scott, Edgar-nominated bestselling author of No Good Deed

“In this engaging, closely observed and intensely humanistic story that reads like Mulder and Scully collecting the immanent evidence of the end of the world, Andrew Dana Hudson helps us see how the real path to a better tomorrow is through rediscovery of the connection and community we have lost.”
—Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas and A Natural History of Empty Lots

Absence comes out May 5, 2026. Preorder now!

Art Tour: Sleepers

Up top is a picture of Sarah Sze’s unique video installation Sleepers (2024), which I saw recently at the Denver Art Museum. We’d gone to Denver basically to see art, and this was a real highlight. One of the most entrancing projection works I’ve seen in years. It immediately made me think of the fractured attentions and thought processes that I see my students wrestling with, trying moment to coalesce into something clear and meaningful and whole. You can watch a short clip of it here.

Rocky Cornelius — uncool hunter, concept shoppe soft-launch defender, action-business guru extraordinaire — is back! Her latest adventure, “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy,” returns the Escape Pod podcast to a capitalist surrealist future rife with collapse, violence, sex, and cross-platform branded content. This time Rocky is doing throuples therapy for a romantically confused trio of multiformat creatives…

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “You make love triangles, but what you’re actually selling is a love pyramid. In the eyes of your followers, your characters’ three-way relationship is intriguingly mirrored by your own, creating a three-dimensional fandom hyperobject. For these stans, the point of Planet Complicated isn’t to simply enjoy each episode, but to speculate, to scrutinize these connections, to hold this prism up to the light and see how things refract.

“They want to know, are you, Hill, actually the inspiration for the inscrutable Captain Gorges? Are you, Tam, the sensitive alien bounty hunter Radnar, and you, Edna, the unpredictable masc-femme fatale Silcira? Or have you remixed the dynamics to throw fans off the scent?”

Rocky is in the midst of making her pitch when an unfortunate drone strike brings their private jet crashing down toward a Dallas golf course.

Now, Rocky Cornelius was not exactly a spiritual person. She had no use for the peasant religions of old, nor the megalomaniacal self-worship of the plutocrats. However, she’d had a formative experience with death, while attending a cacao-fueled heart-sharing-slash-networking circle with her mother.

Sitting there under the high, dim lights of the venerable Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Kim Cornelius beside her learning to let go of fear in the face of uncertain market conditions, eight-year-old Rocky felt a hairy hand come down hard on her shoulder. The middle-aged entrepreneur to her right was clutching his chest and, over the next few minutes, died in what seemed to be tremendous agony.

In those moments, young Rocky had felt intimately connected to her own mortality. She’d made gleeful peace with the fact that she was going to die, including the likely possibility that she would go out loudly thrashing. She might burn/drown in a fire/flood or get trampled at H-E-B in an egg panic or any of the other grisly fates she was used to seeing on her iPad. That would be okay, she’d decided. She could live with death.

But, at the same time—for reasons that emerged from an unspoken objection in the very foundations of her being—she also swore an oath: under no circumstances would she allow herself to die in the state of Texas.

So as the Cessna plummeted and her clients wailed and the pressurized cabin air whistled out of fresh holes in the fuselage, Rocky couldn’t help but lift her head and fixate on the particulars of the geography rushing up toward them. Much was obscured by the grim-gray mass of the polar vortex. To the south, however, was a telltale slate-brown smear of exurbia. That could be Oklahoma, but who was she kidding. That was Dallas. Soul-sick, world-killing Dallas, once the red heart of the American death drive. Which left Rocky no other option.

She’d have to survive.

Will Rocky be able to keep her clients alive amid a deadly freeze-front AND sort out their friendship-straining sexual tension AND find out who shot down the jet AND confront the ghosts of her own fraught Texan past? The only way to find out is to read or listen to “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” (also available wherever you get your podcasts)…

As I’ve discussed previously, Rocky and her satirical future have been a way for me to capture and extrapolate on a certain frenetic nihilism I see in our market-dominated world. But, also, draw out the current of humanity that still bubbles under the layers of technological, economic, cultural, and narrative abstraction the billionaires are keen to bury us in. The first draft I did of this story was a bit darker, seeing no redemption possible for the Lone Star State. (Stephen King, in his JFK assassination novel 11/22/63, implied that Dallas is a more cosmically evil place than Derry, the town he himself had made up with, among other problems, an immortal killer clown.) But that version just didn’t work. I think that no matter how bad times get, we have to believe that our subjugation — to the logic of capital or fascism or any other mode of dehumanization — will always be slipping, always incomplete. If even an avatar of such market logic like Rocky Cornelius can have feels about her mother while tromping through a blow-out Denton County exurb, there’s probably hope for all of us.

A few miscellaneous notes about this story:

• “Bosto-Californian private school kids” Edna, Tam, and Hill were loosely inspired by the trio in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, just with a dash more will-they-won’t-they thrown in.

• Thank you to Michael Burnam-Fink for his valuable contributions to my conception of Rocky’s emotional arc in this story.

• And apologies to Bruce Sterling for appropriating his character Leggy Starlitz (see Bruce’s classic novel Zeitgeist, as well as a handful of his shorts). But, frankly, Leggy came to me, and he made a very compelling proposition. Here’s hoping he doesn’t make too much trouble in Rocky’s world…

Check out “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” from Escape Pod.

Bonus Art Tour: “Day Ride”

ADH: Last summer I wrote an essay coining a term for the persistent bias against hot places I’d observed everywhere from casual remarks by otherwise lovely Canadians to the reporting about Phoenix in various major news outlets. I called it “thermochauvinism.” The crux of the argument was that much of the global north/western world has been conditioned to see air conditioning and the other cooling technologies that make Arizona habitable during the summer as somehow shameful, and yet no one blinks at the gas heating and other infrastructure that make colder places habitable during the winter. In a warming world, we have to get over this bias.

Recently I chatted about this with the author and journalist Lizzie Wade, whose book APOCALPYSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures dropped earlier this year. We started musing about the ways thermochauvinism is rooted in the apocalyptic colonial project that she wrote about. We decided to capture some of our ideas along these lines in a conversation. Sign up for her newsletter, The Lizzie Wade Weekly, where she will too be posting this collaboration of ours.

So, hi Lizzie! To start, what’s your take on my general “thermochauvinism” thesis?

LW: Hi! Your thermochauvinism idea articulates something I’d noticed about the world but never thought to name or question, and now I’m seeing it everywhere – especially the bias against air conditioning and other cooling technologies. Many people in the global north see AC as an optional luxury, the people who don’t agree as weak and spoiled, and the places that need it for human thriving as doomed. I grew up in southern California with heating and central air, and while my family didn’t avoid either, I certainly thought that air conditioning was inherently more wasteful. We never had to adjust our home’s heating to avoid overloading the power grid, whereas that was and continues to be a frequent concern with air conditioning on the hottest days. I was surprised to learn from your essay that heating cold cities in the winter uses more energy than cooling hot cities in the summer. The fact that California’s power grid can’t handle everyone running their AC at the same time is a choice, not an inevitability.

I’m also thinking about another common narrative around AC, which is that spaces that are “overcooled” feel somehow unreal. Sometimes we welcome that unreality, like going to the movies on a hot day. Sometimes we gripe about it, like an office building where everyone has to wear a sweater no matter the temperature outside. But AC is associated with a sense of falseness, uncanniness, perhaps an uneasy sense of borrowed time in our era of climate crisis. I’ve felt that and I’m not sure it’s wrong — but your essay made me realize I’ve never thought of walking into a heated home or café on a cold day in those terms. There’s a sense that AC unnaturally separates us from our environment whereas heating provides a necessary and deeply human refuge within it. Gathering around the fire, etc. Again, I’m not sure either of those narratives is wrong, but trying to switch them around in my mind — cooling as refuge; heating as illusion — reveals how deep my cultural biases about them run.

I now live in Mexico City, where it’s normal to not have AC or heating. We’re in the mountains, above 7,000 feet, so the temperatures have historically been quite mild. Even now, when the hot months are getting hotter, it’s rare to go above the high 80s Fahrenheit. In the winter, it can dip close to freezing at night, but the days are usually sunny and warm. The houses aren’t typically insulated, however, so the indoors can be quite cold in December. There are days where I can wear a coat and gloves inside my apartment, and a sleeveless shirt outside.

But temperature is not really what defines seasons in Mexico City. What defines seasons is water. We have a rainy season in the middle of the year (it used to be April-September; now it starts closer to June or even July and it’s still going strong this October) and a dry season the rest of the time. I grew up with rainy and dry seasons in southern California, although there, winter was wet. Also, we called it “not having seasons,” because it didn’t fit this Northeastern US/European expectation that has been exported to and imposed on so much of the world. Saying Mexico City doesn’t have seasons would be ridiculous. But they don’t line up with the expectations of the people and places who colonized it — and who also drained the lake that used to cover much of what is now the city. Now there are catastrophic floods every single year.

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ADH: The “gathering around the fire” image comes up a lot when I talk about this stuff. But looking at where Homo sapiens likely evolved and lived for most of our existence as a species, we’ve probably spent way more time gathering at the river or watering hole to cool off than around the fire to keep warm. See also Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” where she pokes at our habit of imagining a prehistory of cave men rather than river women. Just another little thermochauvinism living in all our heads. Maybe all this bias dates back to the ice age!

Anyway, good point about the electric grid — both that we underinvest in grid stability, and that our anxiety around AC might be tied to the narratives we’ve heard about heavy AC use contributing to blackouts. Interesting that we have this sense of how we collectively relate to our electrical infrastructure, whereas the main thing I think people know about gas heating infrastructure is to be careful where you dig and to beat it when you smell gas. Nobody worries they’ll blow out the gas network by turning their thermostat up to high. Though, I think attitudes about personal gas use were probably different during the energy crisis of the 70s. We pay attention to what’s scarce.

A couple years ago I lived for a while in northern Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Temperature-wise this was about as far from Phoenix as you can get, but still I noticed that people were used to explaining the unique rhythms of their seasons in much the same way that I’d done in AZ or that you’ve just done with Mexico City. They’d say, “Well, there isn’t quite a word for this in English, but here we have ‘spring-winter’ when the days get warmer but there’s still snow on the ground.” They were highly adapted to these rhythms, changing their lifestyles and social expectations with the seasons, and of course having lots of heating infrastructure to make the place habitable. Even though, in the grand scheme of history, modern heating isn’t that much older than AC, there was a naturalistic sense that these adaptations were the result of many decades or centuries of living in that environment and building culture around it. It’s the opposite of the “unreality” of living in a place where the environmental culturemaking has been erased by colonization — either because the people now living there feel like they are an extension of a society on the other side of the planet, or because the colonizers actively obliterated the pre-existing lifeways.

(Not that Sweden doesn’t have its own issues along these lines, particularly in the north, where some people feel like an extractive colony of southern Sweden. But I think the differences are more palpable outside of Europe.)

But yes, there’s something so weird about stringing Christmas lights on palm trees. Or seeing Santa in a big fur coat in Phoenix, where Christmas is a day on which I tend to push up the sleeves on my lightest sweater around noon. Compare that to the sense of rightness-in-place I felt this summer when I went on a solstice group bike ride, celebrating the beginning of the sun’s retreat by jumping into a bunch of Tempe fountains.

All this has got me thinking that maybe “thermochauvinism” is a symptom of a larger phenomenon. Might we call it “thermocolonialism”? The imposition of one society’s climatic norms and expectations (maybe “thermocultures,” to coin yet another term?) on a place with a different climate. Thoughts?

LW: Thermocolonialism — I like it! It makes me think of another essay you published recently, about how climate change (or rather, climate denial) could be a root cause of the post-truth, “reality is broken” moment we find ourselves in. Everyone knows something is deeply wrong with the climate — even people who don’t “believe” in climate change are experiencing its effects — and everyone also knows we’re not doing anything about it (or at least not even close to enough). This subconscious sense of unease and hypocrisy leads to denying the reality we know we can’t escape but also can’t face directly.

Colonialism has always run on an engine of reality denial, including by imposing one place’s thermoculture on others where it manifestly has no relevance. And yet we all have to pretend it makes sense, and the people who point out the absurdity are the ones who get shouted down as being ridiculous. In my book, I interpreted the modern world’s (or at least the modern West’s) felt sense that something is deeply wrong as the result of the apocalypse of colonialism. We know the world as it’s currently organized isn’t sustainable, in any sense of the word, but the colonial lie of inevitability has robbed us of our ability to imagine anything different, for our pasts as well as our futures. Which is why I think the first step toward building something better is simply doing the hard work of recognizing what is real, now: That our world is already post-apocalyptic. The monster we’re told is just over the horizon is in fact already here, and has been for centuries, disguised as progress and the way things have to be.

That disconnect between the thermoculture and the reality of a colonized place, whether it’s northern Sweden or southern California or Mexico City, is only growing more pronounced and absurd as climate change intensifies. It can certainly be a tragedy, but I wonder if it could also be a way out, a door swinging open to reveal a truth that is too big, and too inconvenient (h/t Al Gore), to see all of at once. Perhaps as part of a larger decolonial project, we can think about the right to our own thermocultures — to accurately describe the climate around us wherever we are, and to decide how to live in it without fantasy or imposition from somewhere else.

ADH: I really appreciate the concept that our post-apocalyptic-ness is at the root of the unease most everyone feels in modernity. My one hesitation is, was it ever thus? I’m thinking of the Abrahamic religions’ story of being kicked out of paradise, or the Hindu idea that we’ve been in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict and sin, for 5,000 years. Many peoples across history have felt that something was wrong with the world — though not all, so perhaps we should look to those who did not build this sense of brokenness into their mythos.

For me this points to one of the big questions in thinking about either the future or the past: how much are events shaped by the structures that have always been there, and how much are they shaped by the new and novel? Is the course of history mostly driven by the emergence of new technologies or ideas, or are the latest inventions/platforms/gadgets/ideologies just a fresh coat of paint on the same old class hierarchy, the same old human instincts?

But climate change is definitely novel. For a lot of places, it will be destabilizing to the local thermoculture. One reason I started writing about this topic is because I think cities like Phoenix aren’t destined to be these abandoned ruins, but instead can offer lessons and blueprints that the rest of the world will need to learn from as the planet heats up. So yeah, a door swinging open. If we can shed thermocolonialism and figure out how to create lifeways that match our actual, existing weather, then maybe we can figure out how to adapt to changing climates. And vice versa!

Here we bump up against another tension, though, between the local and the planetary. Colonialism is clearly a bad way to try to do this, but I kind of do think we should be building planetary cultures and institutions that can better manage planetary-scale crises like climate change, pandemics, extinction, ecocide, et al. So how can we do that while also pursuing the decolonial project and encouraging the reassertion of local thermoculture?

LW: Such a hard question, especially since the existing examples of multi-country or planetary-scale cooperation I can think of protect and enshrine colonial and capitalist power relations (free trade agreements, military treaties, or even the UN, where the big guys get to be on the security council and smaller, often previously colonized countries rotate in). Key to my understanding of any decolonial project — and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m always learning how shallow and rudimentary that understanding is, and trying to deepen it — is the conscious and radical reversal of those power relations.

This isn’t planetary-scale, exactly, but it comes up with museum repatriation work quite a bit. Some institutions struggle to understand that it’s not enough for them, acting alone, to decide to “do the right thing” and repatriate artifacts or ancestors to the communities from which they were stolen. In order for repatriation to actually be restorative and reparative, those communities must be in charge of the process, the decisions, and the goals. Repatriation isn’t only about returning cultural objects or ancestral remains, although that’s important — it’s about recognizing the museum should never have been in charge of them in the first place and is now stepping back into a supporting or even subordinate role.

So in thinking about what planetary-wide cooperation and coordination should look like, perhaps the people to ask are those most negatively affected by climate change (and capitalism, and colonialism) so far. This isn’t a new idea — think of the moral clarity of the Marshall Islands representatives addressing COP — but it has yet to be meaningfully enacted on anything approaching a planetary scale. And I’m not sure it will be, at least as the world is currently structured. But if that structure were to collapse, as so many have before? Maybe then a lot more doors would swing open. Not all of them good, but not all of them bad either.

Ironically, climate change’s destabilization of local thermocultures underlines and amplifies how unsustainable colonialism’s homogenizing project has always been. Twisting environments, ecosystems, and cultures into something the rich and powerful think will make them the most comfortable does not work. It never has, and it never will. And yet we see them doubling down on this delusion all around us. It will probably be like that for a while longer, and the consequences will inevitably compound to make it longer still. I can’t stop them, and I have to live with it. But I don’t ever have to believe the lie I’ve been told that this is just how things are, and how they have to be. I know, with every rainy season flood of Mexico City’s phantom lakebed, that thermocolonialism can’t last forever. The places where it’s cracking are those that can show us the way to something new.

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Preorder My Book

Absence: A Novel comes out May 5, 2026, from Soho Press. It’s a twisty cosmic mystery about a planetary crisis of human vanishing, and a woman who may or may not have the answers the world has been waiting for.

I was planning to talk more in depth about the book and reveal the cover next month, but then I noticed the cover was already percolating out to various bookstore websites. So, consider this a soft launch.

The important thing is that, yes, you can preorder it via Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and a number of other sites. You can also have your favorite local bookstore preorder it for you, which is often a good way to get it on more shelves around the country. However you choose to do it, your preorders are immensely appreciated.

More next month!

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Art Tour: “Desert Heat Wave”

I saw another piece by this local artist, Aimee Ollinger, in one of the new exhibitions at the Mesa Contemporary. I had to track down the rest of her work and found myself delighted by the many elementally-roiling abstract landscapes. Also it turns out we have friends who already have a print of hers, so perhaps we’ll need to hop on that trend…

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Another year, another neverstorm.

This summer Texas hill country was hit with terrifying flash floods, killing hundreds, including dozens of children attending a summer camp. There has been some examination of the role played by recent cuts to government meteorology and the poorly funded flood warning system in the county. But any attempt to advance a rational policy response to this disaster is muddied by various conspiracy theory nonsense and right-wing blame deflection. There is a loud contingent online who see an “unprecedented, yet increasingly common” climate event like this and point the finger not at climate change, but at fantasies of targeted “weather warfare” and nefarious cloud seeding.

Garbage Day featured a couple relatable responses to this deluge of denial:

“A common progressive fantasy is that once conservatives see the consequences of climate change, they will have some sort of come to Jesus moment,” X user @KrangTNelson wrote. “But it was always pretty obvious to people paying attention that they were just gonna blame it on Deep State Flooding Tech and learn nothing.”

Or as @wb_baskerville put more bluntly, “I don’t know how you share a democratic society with millions of people who are just pervasively unwilling to occupy reality in the most basic terms.”

When I teach rhetoric, I cover stasis theory, a concept that dates back to the ancient Greeks. The idea is to isolate the source of a disagreement to one of four categories, or stases:

1. Facts

2. Definitions

3. Quality (severity/values)

4. Policy (what should be done)

It’s very hard to have a meaningful policy discussion if you don’t agree on the previous three stases. Unfortunately, in America today very few of our political disagreements are actually about policy, or even about values. Most of our political disputes are stuck in the first stasis, unable to agree on the basic facts of reality. (Though of course, any good rhetorician will point out that one’s facts do tend to reveal things about one’s values.)

Call it an epistemic crisis. It has loomed like a dark cloud over climate politics for decades, and now looms over all of American life. Neal Stephenson put it succinctly in a recent Long Now interview: “For me the two [biggest problems] are carbon, and the fact that we can’t agree on what’s real.”

In the climate movement, it often feels like dealing with the former (the carbon) is —— in a very stasis theory sort of way —— gated behind dealing with the latter (consensus reality). Or even that the latter is the cause of the former: climate change has gotten out of hand because our epistemic troubles have paralyzed us into inaction.

I’d like to propose, however, that perhaps the reverse is actually true. That perhaps climate change is the reason reality is broken.

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Climate Denial → Reality Denial

The basic argument is this:

1. Everyone knows that climate change is real, that it’s our fault, and that it’s a huge problem for the whole world.

2. Everyone also knows that not much is being done to address this problem, and that what is being done is mostly too little, too late.

3. And yet everyone has to get up and go about their days, carrying on despite knowing the planetary bus is headed off a cliff.

4. This multi-decade acquiescence to inaction in the face of a terrible reality has culturally prepared us to collectively acquiesce to, for instance,

   • politicians who constantly lie to our faces;

   • social media dynamics where lying is a source not of shame but of clout;

   • AI tools that generate answers which merely look correct, but aren’t actually grounded in fact.

5. Thus climate change is behind our epistemic crisis, rather than the other way around.

You might reasonably ask: what about the climate skeptics, the low information voters, the confused and uneducated? Exceptions to every rule, but I don’t think there are any actual climate skeptics. Deniers, sure, but no skeptics. In their heart of hearts, everyone —— even your most ornery uncle —— knows the basic score.

Climate denial is a quasi-religious behavior. It’s about having faith in a personal or sectarian narrative that runs counter to rationality, the findings of scientific inquiry, even lived experience. That faith is the point. It allows one to feel special, superior. It provides comforting answers to tough questions.

The fixation on “weather weapons” is a real tell. Those folks know human activity can impact the weather, but prefer to make themselves and those they identify with into victims of targeted plots, rather than acknowledge that they are participants in a civilization-wide screwup.

As for the rest, the not in-the-know, maybe they aren’t informed on the chemistry or the policy nuance, but everyone has for decades been swimming in a culture of climate anxiety. And as that culture has increased in intensity, so too has the epistemic crisis.

Because this isn’t really about climate denial. It’s about anti-vaxxers and AI hallucinations and fake news and health misinfo and book bans and sports gambling and viral conspiracy theories and fascism. It’s about reality denial. Reality denial and destruction at the highest levels of our society, and reality apathy everywhere else.

A Truth Too Inconvenient

Last month, in my big solarpunk retrospective, I indulged in an extended complaint about the terrible information environment we are choking on in 2025:

Social media, under the auspices of oligarch platform-rule, has turned out to be both addictive and socially/intellectually corrosive in the extreme, particularly for elites and various civil society/courtier-types (reporters, pundits, activists, etc.). Journalism is either in tatters, captured by billionaires and private equity, or strung out on discourse-clicks. The web as a repository of knowledge is crumbling. For various reasons (particularly, I think, the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the climate crisis), our ability to accurately perceive and learn about reality has atrophied, or been deliberately sabotaged. The trauma and dislocation of the pandemic massively accelerated this process, and now the genAI iconoclasm/infoclasm is accelerating it further.

I’ve had a few people ask me about that middle bit (now in bold). It’s an allusion, of course, to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which won him two Oscars and a Nobel Peace Prize. In terms of impact and attention, I can’t think of a documentary with a bigger profile. It was a massive cultural moment that has been completely forgotten.

A lot of climate activists today look back on An Inconvenient Truth as a missed opportunity. The call to action everyone remembers from it is “change your lightbulbs,” when in fact we needed to galvanize people to confront fossil fuel interests and demand massive state investment in decarbonization. 11 years later, An Inconvenient Sequel would hit those notes, but the resentment/dismissal toward the original remains.

But for me, that “inconvenient truth” phrase still has a lot of explanatory power. It’s not “an important truth” or “a necessary truth” or “a useful truth.” No, the most fundamental thing about climate change is that it’s inconvenient, frustrating, shitty. Even if you believe, as I do, that fixing climate change is an opportunity to fix many other problems in our society, it’s still inconvenient that the chemistry worked out this way. It’s inconvenient that we didn’t catch the problem sooner. It’s inconvenient that so much of our society runs on fuel that’s killing us. It’s inconvenient that this is happening now, to us, and not at some later or even earlier point in our development.

For most, climate change is a derailment of collective (as well as often individual) plans and expectations and forward movement. A diminishing of the future as a site of meaning, even as some aspects of perceived futurity arrive in the present. I see it on my students’ faces when I teach futuring: any mention of climate saps the excitement and joy out of imagining the future. As Jay put it in an excellent post/podcast recently, “It feels like the future has run out of road.”

We all gravitate towards convenience. For some people, if “truth” is in the way of living a convenient life, or collecting convenient profits, or punishing convenient enemies, then truth itself has to go.

Paying for Lies

Destroying truth has been the right-wing political project for the entire 21st century, culminating today in the defunding of science and the dismantling of government services that convey accurate information about the world — such as meteorological data about flash flood risk. They’re even moving to incinerate tremendously expensive and useful satellites that track (among other things) the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Usually, accurately perceiving reality is a strategic advantage, even a necessity, for any actor in a competitive arena like politics. Leaders that fire generals whose assessments they dislike don’t historically tend to fare well when actual conflict begins. So why has a major segment of the elite abandoned a clear-eyed reckoning with the planetary situation? In short: money.

Sufficient resources can make up for the informational disadvantage. The fossil fuel industry has been pouring money into politics for decades—the kind of money you get when the whole of civilization is hooked on your product. Partly this buys influence, but also it helps preferred candidates survive the handicap.

The result has been the creation of a political faction where willingness to deny reality is a requirement for entry. If you try to run as a Republican who takes climate seriously, you’ll often get outcompeted by better funded opponents who are happy to call it all a hoax to please their backers. And a system that filters for willingness to talk crazy is a system that will let in a lot of genuine crazy, too.

And we aren’t just talking PAC funding, but huge tranches of economic development. In Louisiana last month, I heard from a former Dem staffer who’d helped the previous governor put together the state’s first climate plan (RIP). “People thought the world would end if you said ‘climate change’ in Louisiana,” he’d said. That really struck me. There was a fear that acknowledging the existence of the climate crisis would cause the fossil fuel industry to pick up and move to another state, Alabama maybe, taking all their money and jobs with them. Everyone lauded the supposed prosperity oil and gas had brought to the state, and everyone felt that denial of reality—even though they could feel it getting hotter and watch sea level rise shrink their coasts—was part of the deal.

This dynamic has been at work for decades, ever since the fossil fuel industry decided they weren’t going to let what happened to cigarettes in that first episode Mad Men happen to them. (Often they had the same lawyers and doubt merchants as the tobacco industry.) If science said their product was harmful, then they’d destroy trust in science. Sometimes I wonder if now they feel a bit like a dog that caught the car—if the corporate leaders who paid to politicize science are now a little nervous about the world they made, with all its resurgent disease and surging fascism. After all, they have to live here too. I remember a line in a Bruce Sterling novel (Distraction, maybe?) about how it’s better to have knowledge in a time of no money than money in a time of no knowledge.

Plus, there is money in the climate transition, and the fossil majors now love to style themselves as “energy” companies as they reach for their slice. It’s so strange to see them participating in spaces like the COP, while back home they fund candidates who want to dismantle the whole UN.

But this type of Janus-faced behavior is normal for the climate era. We’ve all learned to live in unreality. We all go about our days trying to be happy even when, arguably, we shouldn’t be.

To Fix Reality, We Fix the Climate

To be honest, I feel like I’ve only just begun to explore this thesis. It’s argument that can snake into so many corners, recasting culture and politics in a new, often harsher light. How much does climate anxiety fuel the anxiety behind the so-called ‘masculinity crisis’? How much are we driven to addictive screens because the weather is getting worse, and we have reason to be afraid of the sky? How much have we lost faith in journalism because it seems to struggle to tackle the biggest story on the planet? The entanglements are endless, once you start looking for them.

I do know where this argument ends, however, the conclusion to draw that makes this notion more than just another chicken-v-egg debate. It comes down to this: To restore our collective grip on consensus reality, we have to start fixing the climate.

Some on the left have long argued that building a solidaristic working class must start with winning real material gains, such as “non-reformist reforms” like Medicare for All. You have deliver something to show people that your cause is worth joining and struggling with. I think this is a lot like that. Yes, it feels like real societal mobilization around climate is impossible as long as long as we fail to agree on facts and are ruled by shameless liars. But I think we have to try anyway.

And we have to tell a story that goes beyond the world’s current limp climate targets, beyond merely decarbonizing and halting warming at 1.5-2°C. Managed decline and blunted disaster inspire no one, and I think everyone understands, deep down, that this is what’s being proposed. We need to start telling people that an actual restoration of the holocene atmosphere is possible, and that they can be a part of it.

Climate repair. It’s tricky and complicated, but I think it gives us a way of thinking about this problem that is fundamentally less insanity-making. I think for a lot of regular people, the prospect that this crisis can be resolved, that the poison can be sucked from the wound — well, if they hear that, some painful tautness in our souls will start to loosen. The liars and grifters and hallucinations will lose some of their appeal. The world will start feeling like a place worth making sense of again.

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I have a book on the way! Absence: A Novel will tentatively come out May 5, 2026, from Soho Press. It’s a twisty cosmic mystery about a planetary crisis of human vanishing, and a woman who may or may not have the answers the world has been waiting for. If any of the essay above resonated with you, you’ll want to read it.

We’re still finalizing things like the cover, but the preorder pages with some of the metadata (and outdated jacket copy) is now out there. You can find links to your preferred preorder destination by clicking this link or the button below.

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Art Tour: Moon Opera

In DC I saw a wonderful exhibit at the Hirshhorn featuring a huge number of works by the Brazilian twin artist duo OSGEMEOS. The above was one of my favorites.

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A Note on Future Newsletters

For various reasons, I’m looking into moving this newsletter off Substack. So…that may happen! Hopefully it won’t require any action from you, my readers, but just a heads up that the next issue may be arriving to your inbox via another platform.

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The world is full of plans and prototypes and proposals, but any such that hope to actually impact the living, dying material world must choose a time and a place. The problem is that space is limited — everywhere has been mapped and managed and parceled — while time feels infinite — why not start tomorrow, or next year, next decade or century? And so a great many good ideas fail to achieve takeoff. Or perhaps a better metaphor is they fail to land, unable to find an open runway, circling the airport endlessly, burning fuel.

I spent the last two weeks visiting Washington DC and then Louisiana as part of the Carbon Removal Justice Fellowship organized by the National Wildlife Federation and American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal (whom I have worked with before). Funding came from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative before they pivoted away from climate work to philanthropy more politically palatable to the ascendant right. The fellowship brought together an impressive and diverse group of researchers, policy wonks, and activists to consider the intersections between environmental justice (EJ) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

Here’s the story as I understand it. For a long time the idea of removing CO2 emissions from the atmosphere was considered a radical, impractical technofix. It was lumped into “geoengineering” with various stratospheric aerosol schemes, albedo manipulation, and space mirrors. It was, most everyone agreed, much better to simply stop emitting than deal with the carbon after we’d already burned it. But years ticked by and climate action was weak or nonexistent, the energy transition proceeded without replacing much fossil energy, and emissions kept going up. Plus, the planet was heating up faster and with more obviously destructive consequences than anticipated. So in 2018 the IPCC included CDR as part of its 1.5 report: things had gotten out of hand enough that if we were going to hit our targets, we didn’t just have to decarbonize, we also had to do some CDR, to the tune of probably tens of millions of tons a year by 2050.

How to do this is still an open question. There are various “nature-based approaches” that seek to improve carbon uptake in the soil, wetlands, and forests through conservation or regenerative farming or plowing carbon biochar into fields. These are often charismatic solutions, with lovely co-benefits for ecosystem health, but are tricky on MRV: Measurement, Reporting, and Verification — basically, knowing/proving that you are actually drawing down carbon and keeping it out of the air. And nature-based sinks can only hold so much. After all, most of the CO2 we’ve dumped in the air was once locked away deep underground as fossil hydrocarbons; there’s just not room to hold all of it in the biosphere unless we want the Earth to look jurassically different.

So pretty much every serious analyst in this space thinks that reaching gigaton scale will require some amount of industrial CDR: using machines to capture CO2 and store it in underground reservoirs or convert it into some durable, inert substance like concrete. There are machines that do this straight from the open air (Direct Air Capture, or DAC), and machines that do “point source” capture at power plants or industrial facilities (commonly and confusingly called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS). Burning fossil fuels and capturing the CO2 waste is certainly better than dumping it into the atmosphere, but that doesn’t amount to the “negative emissions” the IPCC says we need to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C warming by 2100. But if you harvest biomass (trees or agricultural waste or even corn ethanol), burn it for energy, capture the CO2, and then regrow the biomass (a process called BECCS), perhaps that can count as a removal? It gets twisty.

There are many such hybrid and edge cases. Like Enhanced Rock Weathering (manipulating certain minerals so that they can more efficiently fix CO2 out of the air), which can look natural or industrial depending on how it’s deployed. Or Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement — dumping stuff in the ocean to change it’s pH, which can help it absorb more CO2. Or maybe we can take biomass waste, grind it up into a slurry, and inject it into the seabed. People are devising many clever and interesting plans/proposals/prototypes.

The point is: after 2018, CDR, in all its myriad industrial and nature-based and hybrid forms, began to be taken very seriously. Some countries started talking about funding mechanisms, and some companies like Microsoft started buying carbon credits to balance out their emissions. Some demonstration projects came online.

Hitting that gigaton-scale goal, however, would mean building out a whole new industry, one the size of, say, the automotive sector. One startling figure I heard last week was that CDR could become the largest industry in the world by volume of material moved — CO2 pumped through pipelines, ERW gravel trucked to fields, biomass shipped for storage or burning, etc.

That’s a big industry! How we pay for it is one question. CDR isn’t a commodity like electricity that one might buy and put to use; it’s global public good that transcends borders. So it’ll probably have to be paid for by nation-states or other public entities, or by state-enforced mechanisms that wrest funds from the fossil majors as payment for their climate crimes.

Another question that loomed large in those first couple years after 2018 was who would reap the benefits of all the economic activity CDR promised to create. Who would own the firms that did CDR? Which communities would get the jobs and investment? Would this be another case of the rich cashing in while the poor are excluded from the boom? In 2022 I myself wrote a story in which wealthy white suburbanites in Reno could “pull money out of the air” with backyard DAC rigs, to the consternation of poorer Latino folks who lacked the capital to keep up.

There was a strong feeling in some progressive circles that CDR was a chance to “do industry right,” directing the money and opportunity created by this promised carbon boom to the very communities harmed by the petrochemical industry or disadvantaged by racialized capitalism more generally.

So when, in 2021 and 2022, the Biden Administration began to craft the landmark climate legislation that would become the Inflation Reduction Act (RIP), not only did they direct billions of dollars toward scaling the CDR industry (largely through a mechanism called the 45Q tax credit), they included CDR in the “Justice40 Initiative.”

Justice40 was a plan, now in tatters under the Trump administration, to direct 40% of certain federal investments to benefit disadvantaged communities, particularly those “frontline” areas impacted by pollution and hazards, known in the environmental justice movement as “EJ Communities.”

Environmental justice is very focused on preventing and rectifying localized environmental harms, which have historically been disproportionately inflicted on Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. EJ is not the same as CJ (climate justice), though the latter was born out of the former. The provision of global climate stability might thus seem far afield from EJ concerns, but nonetheless there was a reparative and redistributive EJ vision at the heart of the Biden CDR policy.

What has become apparent in the years since the IRA passed, however, was that this policy fundamentally miscalculated. EJ activists and people in EJ communities looked at the CDR projects being proposed for their areas and saw huge industrial structures that looked suspiciously like petrochemical infrastructure. They saw the deployment of this emerging tech near their homes not as a reparative gift, but as a kind of experiment that would never be run on wealthy white suburbs. And they saw the startups and industry players pouncing on federal CDR money as more of the same: landmen out to secure permits with promises of jobs and limp community benefits that would fail to bring real prosperity and might not be worth the risks and tradeoffs even if they did. The message that was sent back to CDR advocates was “don’t do this here.”

This was the animating impulse behind the fellowship I’ve just completed: trying to square the circle between EJ’s cautionary, preventative, and community engagement/benefit concerns, and CDR’s redistributive and climate opportunities. We need to get carbon out of the planet’s air and put it back in the ground, but where, specifically, should that happen? We need to act on climate as fast as possible, but how to balance that urgency with taking time to make sure plans are safe and communities feel both informed and heard?

We met with federal policymakers on Capitol Hill and state reps in Louisiana, plus nonprofit think tank wonks, academic researchers, PR operatives from CDR companies, and others. We had long and sometimes emotionally difficult discussions. In the end I left with a weighty, anxious sense that this whole endeavor was turning out to be slower, messier, and more complicated than any of us had hoped — and that even before Trump and co blew up the IRA and all US climate policy/science.

How accurate is the EJ perception that CDR = new oil and gas? I don’t know. There are certainly aesthetic and technical similarities between some industrial CDR approaches and petrochemical plants and pipelines. But the risks from, say, a DAC facility seem to me an order of magnitude less severe than, say, an oil refinery. There just aren’t the same nasty byproducts or combustive reactions in the mix, and the whole point is to clean up a form of pollution. CO2 is a largely inert molecule compared to the volatile hydrocarbons of petrochemistry.

Not to say it’s harmless. In 2020 a landslide ruptured a poorly constructed CO2 pipeline near Satartia, Mississippi. The resulting leak swiftly and invisibly knocked people unconscious. The town of 200 had to evacuate and 45 people ended up in the hospital with CO2 poisoning, some of whom have experienced long-term health effects. This incident looms large over the whole industrial CDR sector.

And then there’s the reality that not all “carbon management” projects cashing in on the 45Q tax credit are in the business of scrubbing the air. One Louisiana project we learned about in depth was a plant proposed by a company called Air Products, which would use use methane to make hydrogen and ammonia, but would capture the resulting CO2 waste and pump it into a pore space under Lake Maurepas — thus producing low-carbon fertilizer and “blue” hydrogen. This seems much more like a traditional petrochemical plant in its risks and impacts. And in the long run, the world is certainly going to need a lot of low-carbon fertilizer, but it’s very unclear whether opening this facility would actually speed the closure of some equivalent carbon-intensive hydrogen/ammonia facility. I didn’t come away feeling very enthused about this particular carbon management project.

It doesn’t help perception that the fossil fuel industry is a big — probably the biggest — player in the CDR space. And often they talk about CDR and particularly CCS as a way to keep their toxic business going for further, deadly decades. They even want to use captured carbon to flush more hydrocarbons out of spent wells, a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). That’s bad! Lots of us have written about the need to keep the fossil fuel industry out of the CDR space, but so far that hasn’t happened. They’ve slithered their way in and bought up CDR startups and technologies and dismantled policy attempts to exclude petro-friendly methods like CCS and EOR. It’s a disappointing, if predictable, turn of events, and one that validates critics who view CDR as a false solution propping up the fossil fuel industry.

On the other hand, the fossil fuel industry does have a lot of tech and expertise that’s useful for doing CDR. Presumably a just transition would give oil and gas workers who might be hurt by the shutdown of their industry the chance to put their skills to better use on CDR projects. Similarly, there are real material reasons beyond the Justice40 policy why CDR might be sited near pollution-impacted communities. The geology that made Louisiana so plump for fossil fuel extraction also makes it full of potential for Class VI Wells, which CO2 must be sequestered in to claim that 45Q tax credit. And communities around petrochemical infrastructure may already have workforce with the skills needed for CDR projects.

On the other other hand, perhaps the fossil fuel influence is limiting our imagination. Why capture carbon in one place and then send it via pipeline to a disposal site? Why not do the DAC right on top of the storage reservoirs, powered by on-site solar and wind?1 Why not site such facilities in the remotest areas, as far away from people as possible? Why not make them autonomous, just sucking and pumping, monitored by a skeleton crew of maintenance engineers who hike out for months-long tours like those solitary souls living in firewatch towers, or that couple in The Gorge (2025)?

There are practical difficulties with such a vision. For one, it’s hard to sell such a project as a source of jobs, which is how we’ve gotten used to pitching climate infrastructure, perhaps to our long-term detriment. For two, it’s hard to build things far away from housing, services, et al. But it’s not impossible, and I suspect it will get more and more possible as solar unlocks truly decentralized energy access.

Anyway, EJ activists argue that the concerns of frontline communities should not be conflated with the NIMBYism of affluent “fenceline” communities. Certainly many EJ communities are historically justified in their suspicion of industry and government people telling them not to worry about that pipeline by the school, that smokestack plume, that murky tap water. But in Louisiana, I found it hard to tell how much opposition to CDR was based on EJ concerns and how much was motivated by NIMBYism or viral misinformation or even climate denial.

If you don’t acknowledge climate change — and many people in Louisiana, rich and poor, don’t — the whole concept of putting carbon back in the ground rather than venting it into the air makes no sense. We heard of people opposing projects from a purely “why do we even need to do this?” perspective. We heard of people snubbing CDR startups because they wanted to hold out for a better deal from a richer oil and gas company. We heard of conspiracy theories about solar panels leeching chemicals into the water supply.

Despite or perhaps because of the contradictions, I think most of the fellows came away from these past two weeks feeling like CDR should just not be sited anywhere near EJ communities. As well intentioned as Justice40 was, the reality is just too fraught. They don’t want it, EJ activists have warned, and they shouldn’t be made to do the work of coming around to it. I’m sympathetic to all of this.

But I also came away feeling like there is a deep lack of clarity in the carbon removal space around scope. We have the gigaton number to shoot for, but beyond that, just how much carbon are we talking to about drawing down, and when?

I’ve written before about thinking of climate action as falling into a few distinct “civilizational projects”:

1. Decarbonization: transitioning the energy system, shutting down emissions, stabilizing the climate so we stop getting warmer.

2. Climate Repair: cleaning up the carbon in the atmosphere so we can cool the planet back to a more habitable temperature.

3. Planetary Management: keeping a hand on the “global thermostat” into the long term, optimizing the temperature and dealing with any disturbances in that equilibrium.

Similarly, we can break down CDR into categories:

1. Residual Emissions: greenhouse emissions that have proved too hard to abate, and thus should be balanced out with CDR. There’s a whole politics around what should count as “hard to abate.”2 This is the CDR you care about if your goal is being “Net Zero.”

2. Overshoot Emissions: emissions that push us past our climate goals. We are about at that 1.5°C threshold, so any additional emissions should be drawn down if we want to hit our 2100 targets. This is the CDR you care about if you goal is to stabilize the climate at that 1.5°C or 2°C marker.

3. Legacy Emissions: all the past emissions since the beginning of industrialization that have pushed warming as far as it’s already gone. Do countries or companies have a responsibility not just to get carbon neutral, but to clean up their carbon waste? And do we really want to live on a 2°C hothouse Earth indefinitely, or would we prefer to lower the temp back to holocene levels? This is the CDR you care about if you want to do climate repair to cool the planet back down under the stabilization point.

4. Fluxes: CDR done after the climate repair project is complete as part of a larger planetary management project, balancing the earth system over the long term.

I think a lot of the tensions in the CDR space, particularly when it comes to EJ issues, flow partly from and into unarticulated differences over the importance of these different categories.

If you think industrial carbon removal is inherently an endeavor that puts communities at risk and damages local environments — that every facility is a Satartia waiting to happen — then it makes sense that you would want to minimize the CDR buildout. Climate repair is not a project that should be countenanced. CDR should be allowed only for the very hardest to abate residuals, and perhaps even those shameful emissions could be decarbonized in time. Then the CDR industry could be shut down and consigned to history with the rest of the fossil era. And indeed, I heard one fellow inquire whether CDR facilities would shut down once decarbonization is complete.

Similarly, perhaps you are suspicious that every ton of carbon removal is just a license, moral and sometimes literal, to emit more carbon. In that case, if some locals say are resistant to a particular project, then why push the matter? No reason to allow any more of this ‘false solution’ than we have to, particularly if there are reasonable objections on the ground.

But if you think climate repair is necessary, for the atmosphere is already too hot and dangerous, then perhaps you see CDR differently. You may be looking toward an industry orders of magnitude larger.3 Which means, probably, that more projects need to work out. One can still be critical of CDR companies and how they engage with communities, but I think it’s harder to feel good about a slow and stymied build out if we have so far to go. In which case, it makes sense to put more effort into resolving the concerns and difficulties and contradictions CDR projects raise.

I think it would be supremely helpful if everyone involved in conversations about CDR siting could just say, out loud, which emissions they care about. Otherwise, we’ll all just keep talking past each other, each side unclear on why the other is so reticent or, alternatively, so eager. We’ll never be able to agree on where or when to do carbon removal if we can’t talk clearly about “how much.”

Now, you could also argue that all this is jumping the gun; that we shouldn’t really be considering a multi-gigaton scale CDR sector until we have a fully renewable energy supply; that it’s up to future people if/how/where/when they choose set the global thermostat. And that’s fair. All this is just barely past nascent.

But I think it’s likely that future people will feel themselves trapped in path determinacy by our choices today, just like we feel trapped by the systems built by preceding generations. If we dream big now, and work to do hard, tricky things for the sake of centuries we will never see, we may actually be remembered as good ancestors.

I truly do sympathize with the communities who feel threatened by CDR projects in their backyards or under their lakes, or who want better deals than that old oil and gas bribe of a playground and a few tenuous jobs. But at the same time, CDR seems to me inherently different from the extractive, poisonous petrochemical industry. What’s the opposite of a moral injury? CDR gives communities a way to be a part of a grand civilizational effort to fix the climate — a chance to be climate heroes!

So consider this a clarion call to all CDR-YIMBYs. Make yourselves known! Get loud and demand robust negative emissions in your backyard! Help your neighbors understand the local risks and the enormous planetary benefits.

Truly, we need you. These last few weeks have driven home that all good ideas can be stalled and stymied by the devil’s details: Where to do it? When to do it? How ambitious are we willing to be?

Personally, I say more ambitious. I want future generations to taste that crisp, sweet holocene air. If it means putting a DAC rig in my back yard, so be it.

Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• Shout out to Patrick Tanguay for featuring my Solarpunk 10 Year Retrospective in his excellent Sentiers newsletter. Sentiers is really one of the best futures thinking roundups out there, and Patrick has promised me he’s going to make it even more solarpunk…

• D.A. Xiaolin Spires’ solarpunk story “Luminous Glass, Vibrant Seeds” — which we workshopped last year in an online class I taught — is going to be included in the anthology The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 9.

• Clarion classmate Jenny D Williams has started a newsletter of speculative microfictions titled Certain Impossible Things.

• Workshop friend Penny Walker has a story out in the new journal Sine Qua Non.

• Author and projection activist A. E. Marling has a dope new self-published solarpunk novel out, Neon Riders.

• An ASU classmate of mine, Marrilyn Galvan, has an interesting post published by the NORRAG Global Education Centre in Geneva.

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Art Tour: Painting

In DC I visited the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian’s modern and contemporary art museum. This textured piece reminded me of the mess we’ve made in the air, and our obligation to clean it up.

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It’s been about 10 years since I first heard the word “solarpunk.” It came to me via Facebook feed, in the form of a link to Adam Flynn’s “Solarpunk: Notes Toward a Manifesto.” As a lapsed writer of SFF and one-time poli-sci major, this was a pretty irresistible title for me. So I clicked.

The piece still holds up (I’ve assigned it a couple times). It’s a brief and elegant medley of imagery, references, and sloganeering. It had stuff to say about pop culture, and politics, and the looming climate crisis. For me, the most exciting part was that it implied a science fiction that wasn’t ‘space manifest destiny’ (which I could tell wasn’t happening) or 'cyberpunk singularity’ (which I’d soured on living in the shadow of Silicon Valley) or ‘dystopia/apocalypse’ (which was oversaturated in the post-Hunger Games/Walking Dead media landscape of the teens). And that science fiction had a catchy name that seemed to open up bright vistas of previously clouded possibility.

I was living in the Bay Area at the time and realized that actually I kinda knew Adam. We had met a friend’s birthday escape room night in SF Japantown. So I sent him a message, and we got a beer and talked solarpunk, and pretty soon I started thinking about what I had to say on the topic.

The result was a longread-style essay on Medium titled “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk." Now, a decade later, this is one of the pieces of writing I’m most known for. It’s been read tens of thousands of times, cited in at least a dozen graduate theses, and translated into several languages. Here at around the 10 year mark of my involvement in solarpunk, I want to look back on this piece, talk about how it’s held up, how solarpunk has evolved, and what might be next.

(Obviously the following will make more sense if you read or at least skim the original essay, but feel free also to simply plow ahead.)

First, I want to acknowledge that writing “Dimensions” was personally transformative for me. Back in undergrad I’d done a lot of futures-minded opinion writing, but in the six years after, as I’d burned out of being a journalist and failed to fit in in tech, that muscle had atrophied. In 2015 I was doing communications for an innovation-focused healthcare nonprofit. I’d spent several years miserably deriving self-worth from the relationship I’d moved to California to pursue. To write my own ideas, for my own reasons, and have them find an audience — and then to have similar success with fiction a year later — permanently changed how I saw myself and what I wanted from life. It launched me into the careers I have since chosen for myself: author, sustainability researcher, critical futurist. Perhaps I would have eventually found my way to writing SFF no matter what, but I suspect it would have been a longer, harder road without this leap into the early discursive waters of solarpunk. For that, I am incredibly grateful.

What made “Dimensions” so influential at the time? Well, while these days longreads about solarpunk are thick on the ground (for years the joke was that more words had been written about the genre than of the genre), at the time it was one of a few serious treatments on the subject. It offered a definition of solarpunk that is still commonly referenced today: “a speculative movement to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” And it proposed a solarpunk slogan that struck a chord in the early days of techlash: “Move quietly and plant things.”

Those basic rhetorical hits were nestled in some 6700 words of sprawling sociopolitical commentary. To be honest I was dreading diving back to that slog for this retrospective, but rereading “Dimensions” today, my honest feeling is that it holds up extremely well. Better, in fact, than many of the takes and ideas I’ve had in the interim.

“Bloated malnourishment” has turned out to be a great descriptor of our contemporary consumer experience. The exploration of the implications of Bruce Sterling’s “old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky” has turned out to be pretty spot-on, though many old people have thus far proven more afraid of foreigners, or of those big cities, than the climate monsters actually coming for their necks. The solarpunk “fail states” (smogpunk, hazmat-punk, sprawlpunk, Gibson’s Jackpot) feel like four horsemen now stalking across our unfolding planetary catastrophe.

The essay is clear eyed about a number of tough questions, from the long term decline of the state under capitalism, to the limitations of mass movements, to the need for a paced, long-term, community-oriented outlook on climate work. Clearer-eyed than I myself have often been over the years. And it does a good job of pointing to distinctly solarpunk responses to these questions, which still feel relevant and productive, if perhaps a little pat.

“Easy for you to say!” I found myself scowling at 2015-me. It’s one thing to know that building a better world amidst disaster is going to be a difficult, agonizing process requiring endless patience, compassion, and focus. It’s another to try to work through those difficulties, enduring the agonies, and stay patient, compassionate, and focused.

But this is why I’ve always been drawn to speculative literature as a lens for making sense of the world: the high temporal vantage point allows for self-honesty and inconvenient insight.

When “Dimensions” came out, probably only a few hundred people in the world had ever thought particularly hard about solarpunk, and most of them were on Tumblr. My essay was addressed to that cohort: earnest, online, clever, somewhat younger than me. I wanted to pass on the grab bag of political wisdom I’d acquired during my first decade of adulthood, gathered autodidactically through reading thinkers like David Graeber, following Sterling’s WIRED blog and other aggregators of globalization signals, and hanging around Occupy protests. In doing so, I hoped to nudge the collective imagination I saw at work on Tumblr toward a pragmatic engagement with reality, rather than simply too-good-to-be-true utopian world building.

This is still a real tension in solarpunk. Plenty of solarpunk works feel fully utopian, or at least post- some grand ’transition’ in which the messy matters of power and political struggle were resolved. Some aren’t even set on Earth, or feature various magical technologies that obviate the need for sustainability considerations. I still vigorously believe solarpunk works best as a vision of the fight for a better, greener Earth. But I’ve also become copacetic about it, in part because I think “Dimensions” makes my case on the matter, and I’m happy to leave it there. Solarpunk works fine as a big tent, and lots of people clearly yearn for cozy, utopian alternatives to our conflict-ridden reality.

But the appeal of this escapist impulse within solarpunk highlights the ways “Dimensions” did miss some of the predictive mark. For a year and change later, Trump would lurch into the White House, kicking off a decade+ of political incoherence from all sides, which has trickled out and been replicated across much of the world. In amid that relentless storm of shit, cozy utopias become both more appealing and, in some ways, more radical.

Honestly, the fact that “Dimensions” doesn’t mention, even by omission, US-American presidential politics is one of the best things about it. Hard to imagine such an extensive political treatise doing that today. The result is a set of structural analyses that feel broadly correct, but that lack fidelity. Yes, we are indeed sliding toward a “global oligarchy of the mega-rich,” based on destroying the middle class and dismantling the nation-state. Boy are we ever! But the way that’s happening, with maximum stupidity and spectacle, makes that process feel much more contingent, built out of historical particulars, coin flips that could go either way. (Possibly this feeling is just copium, hard to say.) These particulars matter a great deal when trying to make sense of the present moment and move into the future.

In 2015, I felt like neoliberalism had poured molasses over the levers of socio-economic change. I’d assumed we were plodding toward a second Clinton era defined by a combination of managed decline and mild progress that was mostly palpable as reduced expectations. I saw solarpunk as an antidote to that situation’s characteristic lack of political imagination.

But Trump, Brexit, COVID, Ukraine, and the many other black swans, ‘populist’ turns, and destabilized geopolitical swerves since 2015 have demonstrated that neoliberal technocracy does not actually have its hands firmly on the steering wheel of history. Which means that, for better or worse (right now worse), much more political change is possible than I had previously thought. This changes how we strategically relate to politics.

In 2019, for a zine essay, I explained my personal 2017-ish evolution from Graeberian anarchist to DSA-style socialist using the following diagram:

Basically, your guess as to the power and intractability of the present hegemonic system determines what you think you can do about it, which in turn determines, as much as your values, your actual active ideology. Today that system is capitalism, but 500 years ago you could have applied this quadrant to monarchy or the Catholic Church.

“Dimensions” nestles solarpunk firmly in Build the Alternative:

In light of their power, overthrowing the mega-rich is a dicey project, and one perhaps left to a different kind of political aesthetic. Instead solarpunk can challenge the capitalist status quo by nurturing alternative economic arrangements at a community and network level. Encourage resiliency that insulates towns and neighborhoods from economic shocks. Forge mutual aid pacts that protect members from fiscal predation. If we can prove that we don’t need them or their money, the chokehold of the plutocracy will loosen.

But that strategy only makes sense if you think there is a chokehold, that political upheaval is not imminent. The advent of populism in the late teens changed that calculation for many. If Trump could get elected, anything could happen, and might!

So people who might have previously been drawn to solarpunk Alternative Building strategies, like mutual aid and guerrilla infrastructure projects, instead flocked to the organized left, hoping to make a play for the levers of power. (I was one of them.) And indeed, in those heady years after 2016, DSA chapters and other such spaces were rife with debates about the role of such activities——versus, say, electoral campaigning or labor organizing——in the broader left political project.

Along with this swing in apparent political possibilities came increased ambitions for policy programs——both because Trump revealed how close to crisis we were (and now we are no longer merely close), and because the limp neoliberal reforms of the Clinton/Obama eras were blamed for Trump’s rise. This meant, in the US anyway, that universalist policy ideas like Medicare for All, a basic income, or a jobs guarantee gained new attention. As did what would soon become, for a while at least, the premier hope for addressing the climate crisis: the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal (and its accompanying propaganda) had a lot in common with solarpunk. Both embraced renewable energy and rail infrastructure as beautiful parts of the landscape. Both were full of lush, green, city scenes packed with bicycles and diverse, happy peoples. Both offered meaningful work on material reality as a way out of economic and social alienation. And in 2023, AOC, one of the Green New Deal’s main champions in Congress, endorsed solarpunk on an Instragram livestream.

But over the years I occasionally argued that solarpunk was not quite the aesthetic of the GND. To me, the best solarpunk is countercultural (that’s what the “punk” means), exploring what a visionary, dissident minority might do when they get their hands on the technology of sustainability, like cheap solar panels, innovating new life ways that prefigure a better world. As Gibson said, “the street finds its own uses for things.”

The GND, on the other hand, needed to be majoritarian, a program that could turn a huge portion of the working class toward enacting the climate transition. It needed to be about millions of regular people going to work on projects that would save the planet, and about universal economic reforms that would provide the masses with greater security in an increasingly unstable climate. The ‘New Deal’ part of the name harkened back to a previous era of big infrastructure carried out by proactive public servants——the state rising the challenge, rather than leaving cracks that clever punks could fill. All this seemed to me a different vibe than crusty, nonconformist, countercultural solarpunk.

That said, my view on this was somewhat changed on this by Cory Doctorow’s novel The Lost Cause. In that book, the Green New Deal has been passed, but still the novel is full of solarpunks of various stripes. They are the ones pioneering the lifestyles of the future, leading caravans of climate refugees, leaping into action when disasters strike, defending the GND from maga reactionaries, and generally pushing for the GND to actually be enacted with vision and ambition. They are out there asking forgiveness not permission to carry out the transition that the broader society has agreed to, but may not always take initiative on. An activist minority, not exactly dissident, but definitely radical. A vanguard.

The point is, the political dimensions of solarpunk are not necessarily static. They looked one way in 2015, and looked somewhat different by 2018, because the political situation around them changed. In 2020 I noticed an uptick of attention flowing to my “Dimensions” essay, as the strain of the pandemic brought issues of state decline into sharper relief. In that moment, mutual aid to fill in the gaps in state capacity again seemed like a viable and valuable strategy for social change, and there were a great many of those efforts that popped up everywhere——though I think these proved hard to sustain as life for many become more and more online, yet further removed from the engagement with material reality that distinguishes solarpunk from cyberpunk. Then under Biden we got the IRA, and for a brief time it seemed like maybe there was room for entrepreneurial solarpunks to soak up some of that money and put it towards more radical projects. And now, with fascism on the march and the American administrative state in tatters, solarpunk needs to comport itself into the larger struggle to fight and resist authoritarianism and oligarchy, while also working to sustain communities through the bad times and conceiving of the new social compact that can come after.

(All of this, of course, is speaking of mostly of the American context, and solarpunk has always been a global phenomenon, with lots of activity in Europe, in Brazil, in Australia, in Canada, all over. In many of those places our recent dive into political iniquity has actually shifted the political winds in the opposite direction.)

Again, this present situation of decline and hostility from the state is not that different than the future context for solarpunk struggle “Dimensions” imagined. I see two major distinctions, challenges that don’t feel fully grasped in “Dimensions.” First, in the US at least, the Trumpian right is an increasingly irrational, destructive, and powerful opponent of a better world. Not only do they resist sustainability, they are throttling in the opposite direction. They don’t just refuse to believe science, they want to destroy science. They aren’t just blocking policy reforms but actively pushing against the economics that have tilted to favor renewables. All this feels like it could last for decades or change in an instant.

Second, and relatedly, the information environment is much worse today than I predicted in 2015. (On a recent call Jay called it “a decade defined by an extremely toxic interpersonal environment for ideas.”) Social media, under the auspices of oligarch platform-rule, has turned out to be both addictive and socially/intellectually corrosive in the extreme, particularly for elites and various civil society/courtier-types (reporters, pundits, activists, etc.). Journalism is either in tatters, captured by billionaires and private equity, or strung out on discourse-clicks. The web as a repository of knowledge is crumbling. For various reasons (particularly, I think, the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the climate crisis), our ability to accurately perceive and learn about reality has atrophied, or been deliberately sabotaged. The trauma and dislocation of the pandemic massively accelerated this process, and now the genAI iconoclasm/infoclasm is accelerating it further. As Neal Stephenson recently put it, one of our big contemporary problems, along with too much carbon in the atmosphere, is that we simply can’t agree on what’s true.

There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.

Despite the challenges——or perhaps because of them——solarpunk has, on balance, been a tremendously successful “memetic engine.” In 2015 solarpunk was a hypothetical literary genre without any actual literature in it. Now there are hundreds of short stories, dozens of anthologies and magazines, a handful of prominent novels, and many more eclectic works that are explicitly called or marketed as “solarpunk.” (Not to mention all the solarpunk Content on Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, etc.) Plus, an order of magnitude more works have clearly been influenced by solarpunk sensibilities without adopting the label.

(Sometimes you see people trying to iterate further on the -punk genre, insisting that their sustainability-minded fiction/aesthetic is actually “lunarpunk” or “soilpunk” or “hopepunk.” I don’t think most of these sub-subgenres are actually A Thing, but who cares? The point of genre terms is to let people heuristically access new swaths of possibility space. If a new or niche -punk does that, let a thousand flowers bloom.)

Much of this literary work has been cultivated very deliberately through short story contests and anthology calls. People didn’t just spontaneously start writing solarpunk; often they started because someone asked them to. This has been a core mechanism of the memetic engine. One of the first bits of solarpunk punditry was Adam Flynn’s “On the Need for New Futures” way back in 2012. This sentiment has since been echoed by many, many institutions and publications. Which has in turn cultivated and enhanced solarpunk’s open, pluralistic, and polyphonic nature.

In the realm of politics, it’s a little murkier. On the one hand, there’s that AOC shout out. Ten years from Tumblr posts to literally the halls of power, endorsed by one of the most important political figures in the country (nothing but respect for MY president)——that’s a pretty good outcome for a cultural project that had, to start, a dozen or so dedicated advocates.

On the other, you have, for instance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance (see various discourse) using solarpunk vibes to try to set the next agenda for the US Democratic Party. The central Abundist pitch is to call for various reforms that could allow us to build more housing, renewable energy, transit, et al: “Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply?” Off the bat, that doesn’t sound so bad. I myself have made a variation on this argument since at least 2018:

Let’s give ourselves one out, one advantage, something we can work with, right? A tool we can crack into these problems with. Abundant solar power, that’s a good one. One because that’s what we’ll need to capture and dispose of the 500 gigatons or so of carbon waste we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. And two because abundance is a paradigm that breaks people out of the zero-sum thinking that makes poverty and deprivation seem unavoidable.

So in some ways, we can interpret the presence of the Abundists faction among the center-left as a real win for solarpunk. Isn’t this kinda how politics should work? You make a proposal that at first seems radical, but if you make it consistently enough and convincingly enough, your ideas will trickle through the political spectrum until even moderates and conservatives find a version of your proposal palatable and sensible. Overton Window = moved. You may not get all you were asking for, but you get some, and that’s a win, and you keep fighting from there to get more. We didn’t get the GND, but we got the IRA, and (for a little while) that was a generational triumph for the climate movement.

But it’s also very easy to view the Abundist movement as an attempt to co-opt and strip away all that makes solarpunk (and the GND!) truly transformative. Some have called it a Trojan Horse to advance neoliberal de-regulation under the banner of the green transition. Matt Bruenig argued that it’s a play to offer “the most progressive-sounding agenda that does not involve significant welfare expansions, tax increases, unionization, or public ownership.”

And certainly, many would love to just build the garden-roofed ecotopia without all the messy class struggle, the delicate balancing of various environmental and community concerns (red tape, ugh!), the slow growing of real grassroots resilience and power? Solarpunk subreddits, Facebook groups, and other image-forward spaces have long fielded debates about whether solarpunk *had* to be anti-capitalist. This is one of the hazards of being an aesthetic as well as an ideology.

My take is that we can be for abundance, but to solarpunk the low hanging fruit of meeting-everyone’s-needs-and-then-some is seizing the vast hoards of wealth and real estate controlled by the ultra-rich. Some of the earliest solarpunk stories featured Occupy-style movements taking over empty penthouses and corporate offices and using them to house and care for refugees and the unhoused. Or else solarpunk imagines building amazing things outside the market economy: permaculture-subsisting punks salvaging roller coaster steel from flooded theme parks to create magnificent, multi-use art structures; not private developers throwing up endless, shoddy, gentrifying condos, many of which will be turned into AirBNBs or sit vacant as stores of investment capital, not human beings. Are such anarchist dreams always realistic? Of course not. They’re aspirational.

The Abundists are just the latest in a series of moments in which solarpunk has had to confront the contradictions of getting more mainstream. The “Dear Alice” Chobani ad, for instance, prompted much gnashing of teeth about corporate co-option of solarpunk aesthetics. (FWIW, I think it’s actually really powerful that some firms like Chobani, Chipotle, or IKEA are taking big swings toward sustainability, not because of pressure from activists but because they are voluntarily choosing to align with the solarpunk vision/meme.) Or genAI imagery is, justifiably, much maligned in solarpunk circles, and yet I’ve met people who found out about solarpunk through Midjourney forums and were inspired to move into careers in solar.

At the same time, solarpunk has absorbed a bunch of positive influences that weren’t so much a part of the conversation a decade ago. Actually reading Indigenous ecologists and philosophers has helped solarpunks ease out of the Western mindset and has given solarpunk historical examples of sustainability to emulate. Library Socialism has emerged as one of solarpunk’s most compelling economic concepts. Planetarity has given solarpunk a way to think through bigger scales. And as a literary movement, solarpunk has grown up alongside a broader push for more inclusive and diverse speculative fiction, so that more peoples and cultures can see themselves represented in futures and fantasies.

Probably the most important solarpunk development of the decade, though, is that we were right to bet on solar power. The technology could have plateaued. Instead, costs keep dropping. Efficiency keeps improving. Deployment keeps hockey-sticking. Circularity is getting closer. Land use is looking less zero-sum. A lot of this is thanks to China, but everyone is getting a piece of the action. Solar panels are now cheaper per square meter than wooden fencing. We don’t know what The Street is going to do with this tech now that it’s cheap, but I expect we’ll soon find out. Batteries are coming along too——turns out you can make really cheap ones out of salt, no Lithium Wars required. In general the world of renewable energy generation and storage continues to be full of ideas worth sci-fi-geeking out over.

So what’s next? Where does solarpunk go for its next decade?

I think there’s a certain amount of “letting it breathe” that can and should happen. In my own work, I’ve felt drawn to writing solarpunk stories that aren’t didactic or post-normal, aren’t trying to communicate solutions, are just about living in the world that’s emerging, beautiful and terrible. I think there’s going to be a lot of that.

And there’s going to be a lot of solarpunky images and characters and architecture casually showing up in TV and movies and video games and anime, which will then percolate into the real world in various ways. That’s already baked in, the result of our years of labor putting our hands in the cultural soil.

We’ve spent over ten years imagining better futures. When I wrote “Dimensions,” that task itself seemed daunting, obscured as alternatives were by the choking neoliberal smog. But, in a tremendous feat of collective imagination, we did it. We pulled it off. From the policy-wonkish, to the pro-topian, to the perfectly utopian, we’ve created a range of answers to the question, “what does a sustainable world look like?” Solarpunk can now serve as a vital shorthand for that set of imaginaries.

I’m not saying the worldbuilding work is fully complete, but I do think we’ve reached a robust place. It’s time we turned our attention to other tasks, to the other part of the definitional question: “how do we get there from here?”

What’s next needs to be not just narrative and aesthetic interventions but actual interventions, in material reality. Not just future visions but concrete projects and plans——hundred year plans, if you can swing it——working with actual people in actual places. This is a harder sell after a decade of everyone getting more online, but one thing I’ve learned from my students is just how discontent we all are with this shift, just how ready we are for what solarpunk offers.

One of the truly wild things about following this stuff for the last ten years is that the most intensely solarpunk examples all come from real life, not fiction. The solarpunks already exist; their stories just aren’t evenly distributed yet. Cyberpunk didn’t invent the persona of the hacker, but it did make a whole lot of people want to be hackers. Solarpunk can and should do the same, pointing us toward lifestyles, careers, communities, and choices that are regenerative for both the planet and the soul. It shouldn’t just show us a solarpunk world, but show us how to become the solarpunks, right now, who can build it.

Personally, I’m getting older. Saving the planet is going to require digging a lot of ditches and hauling a lot of solar panels up onto roofs and potentially strolling through a lot of tear gas. That’s all a young man’s game. If a global civilian climate corps started recruiting able-bodies tomorrow, I’m not so sure I’d make the cut.

But on the other hand, my parents have, slowly but surely, over years, replaced much of the grass of their suburban lawns with raised beds, fruit trees, grape trellises, berry patches, compost bins, rainwater barrels, edible cover crops, and pollinator-friendly ornamentals. It’s a truly beautiful transformation. If they can do that in their 70s, I can surely find something useful and generative and solarpunk to do in my 40s.

In conclusion, the basic analysis of “Dimensions” still seems right: the neoliberal nation-state may be fucked, but the street, the neighborhood, the town, the network, the people can thrive——and make something better. And the final sentiment of “Dimensions” seems right too, with a few small edits:

I wrote this because I believe the enormity of our problems doesn’t have to paralyze us. Quite the opposite: seeing [how the world could be] is vital if you are going to [make sense of how it is]. Now is the moment to be [re]galvanized, to know that we [have been] on to something, and to make acting on these ideas a real part of our lives.

So I leave you with this provocation: forget what you’ve imagined, and instead ask yourself how will you be a solarpunk? How will you be one this year, this month, this week, tomorrow? There’s no time to waste. The next decade has already begun.

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Fellows + Travelers

• Longtime solarpunk thinker Jay Springett is bringing his weekly podcast project, 301 Permanently Moved, to a 301-episode conclusion. It’s been a truly impressive project, both as a creative practice (for a long time the challenge to himself was to write, record and edit the podcast in a single hour) and as a sum body of work containing thoughtful commentary on a vast array of subjects in a vast array of forms. I highly recommend checking out the last of the run.

• SFF writer Sam J. Miller has a new newsletter/fiction project called Undercover in the Apocalypse, which I’m excited to follow.

• Wren James, prolific writer and founder of the Climate Fiction Writer’s League, has put together and released the Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook. It’s sort of one part cli-fi genre primer, one part writing exercise journal and story planning notebook. I contributed a smidge of feedback on the project, so it’s cool to see it live!

• Lizzie Wade, author of the freshly released APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, had a great post about AI and the unfortunate dawn of a new, extractive “imagination economy.” The piece quotes my own recent anti-AI dispatch and feels like an important continuation of the conversation I was writing into.

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If you liked this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

Last summer I made the case for bringing the principle of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — to our broader discourse on AI. It seemed like a good way to bind together the various felt and thought objections to AI into a common credo. And a good way to distinguish between benign forms of so-called “AI” (spotting tumors, for instance) and the sycophantic imitations of humanity being peddled by the various broligarchs.

Since then, this “hard no” movement against AI has started to take shape. For one the t-shirt game keeps getting better. Traps are being set on the internet to punish AI scrapers and poison datasets. The new Chicago pope bashed AI in his first big speech. Just in my literary corner of the world, anti-AI clauses are becoming standard in book contracts and magazine submission forms. A recent episode of AppleTV’s The Studio ended with a crowd at ComicCon — and Ice Cube — chanting “fuck AI.” Last week there was a WorldCon kerfuffle (sigh) over using ChatGPT in part of the panel selection process.

(My WorldCon take is that, well intentioned though it was, feeding an AI a list of names and asking it to compile dossiers of their scandals and transgressions is a pretty dystopian use-case.)

It’s clear that writers, artists, and others in that orbit increasingly view any amount of engagement with LLMs as a betrayal of creative class solidarity. The sentiment (which I’ve heard all the way from Tumblr teens to Pulitzer Prize winners) seems to be something like this:

I’ve heard pushback about such anti-AI puritanism, the ways it’s just another case of social media mob culture. For me, this is where the Butlerian Jihad continues to be a fruitful metaphor. The Dune books are all about how holy wars and revolutions are not gentle or reasonable, how they can turn ugly, righteousness fueling a fire that can consume nations and worlds.

The other way the metaphor is proving apt is the deep-seated, almost spiritual nature of anti-AI sentiment. It’s not just more Luddism. Many people — though hardly all, given the popularity of AI products — sense that there is something grotesque about these simulacra, the people who push them on us, this whole affair. That aversion to the technological profane holds even when various stated objections to AI are supposedly addressed or nitpicked to death.1

Meanwhile, throughout all this, I have myself felt on the front lines of something like a grand struggle against these likeness machines — not just as a creative but as a teacher. Because what’s become clear over the past year is that the killer app, the median American use case for products like ChatGPT, is cheating on your homework.

There’s been a lot written about this lately — a big article dropped in New York Mag as I was sitting down to type this newsletter, and a discord mutual had a similarly thorough piece a couple weeks ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Both pieces get into the increasing AI frustration among teachers and the increasing AI dependency among students.

There was a lot of hope for the value of AI in education (and still is, if university partnerships with tech companies are any measure). An infinitely patient digital tutor that can tackle any question (a la the Primer in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, and probably a hundred other SF references) sounds like just what a strained education system needs — if it didn’t hallucinate constantly, that is. And I know teachers who use it. They’ll have students check with ChatGPT in class to get answers to discussion questions, or encourage its use in revision. Some are no doubt having AI write emails to students and paper feedback, too.

But these articles show that concern is mounting over a few factors. First, there’s a big difference between getting something explained to you, and actual learning. You might feel like you are learning when querying a chatbot, but those intellectual gains are often illusory.

Second, AI severs the connection between an output, like an essay, and the real learning, thinking, and practice creating that output usually requires. There’s now no way to be sure that a student who turns in a good essay actually has a grasp on the material that assignment was supposed to push them toward understanding. Thus, AI lets students skip the “desirable difficulties” that produce real learning. The temptation to skip these difficulties is powerful enough that even very engaged students, students who understand the value of “desirable difficulty,” will use AI for the sake of their GPA, their time, and their stress levels.

This corner cutting doesn’t seem to be confined to core classes students have to slog through on their way to their major. At AWP this spring, I attended a panel on fending off AI in the creative writing classroom. Even students who should be on the side of Batman (above) may turn to AI when they’ve fallen behind and have a workshop story due. Sad, because some of our best thinking and writing and storytelling often happens when racing to make a deadline! The takeaway from the panel was: less focus on the product and more on process.

From my own anecdotal experience teaching English over the last two years, particularly first-year composition classes, I can confirm the in-roads genAI has made with American college students. I’ve seen it happen in real time. My first semester I caught one, very tech-minded student using ChatGPT for an assignment. My second semester I caught a couple more. Last fall, I sent back rhetorical analysis papers from a full quarter of my class for obvious (and erroneous) AI usage.

At this point, it wasn’t just the comp-sci or business majors or the generally disengaged. That quarter last fall included one of my most engaged students, who had ChatGPT analyze, of all things, one of Ted Chiang’s New Yorker essays on AI. Her mistake was forgetting to include the byline when she copy-pasted into ChatGPT, and so the bot helpfully filled in the author as Jonathan Franzen. Most of the time when I catch students using the homework machine, it’s because of “user error” like this. I’ve had students use AI to write event reports, and then turn the reports in before the event actually took place. I’ve had students submit end-of-course reflections in which they talk about projects we didn’t do or gush about how I’d become “not just a teacher but a mentor” when I’d never once seen them at office hours.

Without such user error, it’s getting hard to point to AI prose with any kind of probable cause. Sometimes I spot two assignments using the same not-quite-right phrase or characterization, or the quotes or citations are sus. Otherwise, often I sense that something isn’t quite right, but it isn’t enough to call the student out on. And I’m sure there are cases where I don’t pick up on the AI usage, either because students engaged with the chatbot in a more upstream fashion, or because they used various prompt tricks and prompts to make their text seem more authentic (inserting typos, etc.).

Students are also increasingly aware of this tension. Last fall when I emailed students with suspect papers asking if they used AI (and promising to let them resubmit), they pretty much all fessed up. This past semester I tried the same thing, but those I emailed mostly held firm and denied cheating, knowing, I think, how much of a hassle it would be for me to actually escalate the situation to the level of an academic integrity violation. And it was, so I didn’t.

So a lot of AI work gets past my bullshit filter. The result is that grading and giving feedback — always a chore for teachers since time immemorial — now feels more adversarial and less collaborative. Which I hate; we should all try to banish cop-mindset from our psyches and pedagogies. It’s not that I’m eager to catch my students cheating, but I earnestly think I’m doing them a disservice when I let them let AI do their writing and thinking for them, as though — to borrow a popular metaphor — they were using a forklift at the gym.

There’s a big difference between having ChatGPT compose your emails because you don’t want to do it yourself and having AI compose your emails because you can’t do it yourself.

Folks like Sam Altman have compared ChatGPT to a “calculator for words,” and honestly I don’t think that’s far off (except of course calculators do not make shit up). But the existence of calculators does not mean we want to live in a society where people don’t learn to do basic arithmetic. The same principle should apply here. I want my students to write unassisted because I don’t want to live in a society where people can’t compose a coherent sentence without a bot in the mix.

Plus, engaging earnestly with bot-written text is mentally deadening, and frankly I do resent when I have to read it. There’s just no there there, especially if what you’re looking for is a human you can have a conversation with. It reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem, in which misbehaving monks are forced to study a collection of subtly incoherent texts as a form of punishment. Sifting through a bunch of potentially bot-written likeness essays comes with a certain paranoia lurking over my shoulder. Which feels poisonous for the whole process of teaching and learning.

This past semester I tried to make it harder to use AI in my classes, and hopefully, thereby, reduce the poison. Students were asked to compose their work in Google Docs, so I could see they weren’t copy-pasting big chunks of text in. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, as, no matter how much I walked them through it in class, I always had to chase some students down to get access their docs, or untangle weird Canvas integrations, etc. And I’m certain some students were prompting ChatGPT in one window and then hand-typing their essay in the other.

When I first started teaching comp, we were given three options for language to include about AI on our syllabus.

1. Cited Use: Students were free to query an AI tool and include that language in their assignments, so long as they cited it as one would another source.

2. Guided Use: Students could use AI as directed by me in the classroom.

3. Unauthorized Use: Students were asked not to use AI at all, (even though, the language acknowledged, these tools could “help them complete assignments more efficiently”).

For the first year, I went with option #1, figuring it would help me avoid exactly the kind of paranoia described above, and that I could help students learn to avoid the pitfalls that were common in AI writing circa 2023. Exactly zero students cited AI use in their papers. Even when there are licit ways to disclose AI input on their assignments, students prefer to try to pass bot-writing off as their own. Which to my mind means that they believe AI is cheating and turn to these tools specifically to cheat.

All the while my students have been eager to write about and discuss AI, with very little prompting from me. I wrapped up this past semester with a “Writing to Future” project where students tried out futures thinking techniques and produced foresight artifacts contrasting predicted vs. preferred futures. Several of them came up with projects fretting about futures with ubiquitous AI and yearning for futures in which tech use is more moderated than today.

I’ve heard these frustrations over and over again from my students. AI is just a new layer on top of the addictive tech stack of phones and screens and social media and Zoom and online educational platforms they’ve spent their whole lives in. Many of them deeply resent that they never had a choice about all this. They get to college and find that their problems with this stuff don’t go away when they are out on their own; in fact the addictive patterns often get worse without family structure keeping them in check.

These conversations — the pleas from young people caught up by these products and unable to get out — are part of what’s pushed me toward the Butlerian Jihad line of thinking. I think there is a good case to be made for trying to restrict AI use among young people the way we try to restrict smoking, alcohol, gambling, and sex. Those policies are imperfect, but they do steer young people away from behaviors that can disproportionately harm them more than adults and that they don’t yet have the capacity to regulate the way (some) adults can.

There are developmental reasons for such restrictions, and pedagogical ones. But also, it seems like our tech overlords aren’t able to create an LLM “personality” that won’t generate CSAM or engage minors in sexual role play (often using celebrity voices). Which highlights the problem with presenting these technologies not as simply a calculator for words but as a “likeness of the human mind.”

Not that adults are necessarily great at managing the negative cognitive impacts of these technologies. This harrowing article from Rolling Stone about “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” points to a growing mental health crisis as users talking to chatbots fall into existential confusion. Which is exactly what I predicted would happen in my years-old story “The Chaperone”:

Very rarely she’d have customers who owned up to and defended their feelings. “Who are you to say what can feel and what can’t? Trini has evolved. She’s emerged!”

“Emerged.” There was a cottage industry of books and forums that sold these lonely men vocabulary like that. They had a whole mythology. The worst charlatans pitched Jan’s customers the notion that sufficiently complex relationships — the power of love! — would make weak AI phase shift to strong. Jan felt sorry for the men who needed such prophecies. Imagine the aching ego it took to believe your chatbot crush could kick off the singularity.

Meanwhile cheating with AI is not confined to homework. It’s happening in business and law and science. This is not just using AI help with dull writing tasks. It’s engaging with reality based on nonexistent citations and caselaw. It’s choosing convenience over fidelity to the truth — perhaps the slipperiest slope of all.

All this points to a need for a new framework for thinking about and addressing the negative cognitive impacts of these products. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this comparison I saw on discord:

I also think we might be in a place in 20-30 years where AI is like the laudanum/heroin of the late 19th century; everybody loved it, was instantly addicted, and it was so bad we had to invent new kinds of crime and regulation

For my part, I’m going to try something new in my classroom next fall: pen and paper. I’m going ask students to keep their devices put away and work their ideas onto the page by hand. Students will turn in hand-written freewrites, take notes on paper, mark up printed out readings, and receive line notes in colored ink — all that old school methodology that did successfully educate a number of generations before personal computers came along. I’ll have to learn how to read student handwriting (and improve my own!), but I think it’ll be worth it. Any suggestions you have on how to pull this off are most welcome.

This isn’t just about AI, but the way students are distracted by their screens in general. I know how hard they are to resist — as a grad student I’ve been as guilty as anyone of surfing and emailing and texting during class. This past semester was particularly bad on that front. So many were working on other homework in class, watching sports or tiktok, that the broad discussions I try to cultivate often struggled to get off the ground. (For what it’s worth, I received an award for teaching excellence this semester, so I don’t think it was just me failing to engage them effectively.)

I also I want to give grades more for completion and participation than quality of outputs. We’ll try to get more into the process, and worry less about the product. Banish the cop from my mind and teach as best I can.

It’s odd, because I was always a student who hated writing by hand. With the exception of a few periods living off the grid, I’ve always been happy to do my creative and professional work on laptops. Cut and paste is an essential tool in my writing process. But I’m excited to push myself to try out the analog methods for a while. And I’m hoping that in doing so I can cultivate a classroom that gives my students a respite from the dark patterns they are bombarded with.

AI boosters love to say that AI will change everything, and I think in education they may be right — just not in the way I suspect they hope. Beating the likeness bots and the cheating machines will require us to become more present with each other, more humble and careful in our words and choices, and, most of all, more human. But, as with all our great 21st century challenges, I’m hopeful that on the other side of that struggle, we may find a better world.

Cosmic Mystery Club: Memories + Mirror Mazes

Over at my partner’s newsletter, the Cosmic Mystery Club, CYB is discussing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a puzzle video game we played together over Christmas. Not gonna lie, even having played it I don’t think I actually understood the plot until reading C’s breakdown. Anyway, go check it out, and subscribe to the Cosmic Mystery Club.

News, Reviews + Miscellany

• As mentioned above, I was given a Teaching Excellence Award from ASU’s Graduate Student Government.

• I also took first place in graduate fiction at the 63rd Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Awards with my story “Any Percent.”

• And I found out just yesterday that later this summer I will spent a couple weeks in DC and Louisiana as part of the Carbon Removal Justice Fellowship Program put together by the National Wildlife Federation and the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University.

• I think I linked to this previously, before it was fully cooked, but here’s an interview I did last fall for the blog of ASU’s literary journal Hayden’s Ferry Review.

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Art Tour: Turbulent Mountain Waterfall

During a recent visit to the excellent Phoenix Art Museum, along with the Remington piece at the top, I enjoyed seeing this beautiful drip painting by Pat Steir. An image I’m going to hold in my mind as the Arizona heat begins to take hold.

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Solarshades was off last month due to being swamped with work, sick, and generally not having anything nice to say about our likely future. It’s been a tough couple months. I’ve gotten noro, covid, and the flu — and had to cancel a much-anticipated international holiday as a result. I’ve been juggling a lot of coursework and teaching, as well as working through manuscript revisions for my forthcoming novel Absence (which, thankfully, I sent in this past week). And of course, there’s the world. The worst people in America are in power, and they’re flaying our society out of pure, spiteful id. I’m now anticipating hitting the job market during a world-historic global economic downturn for the third time in my life (2009, 2020, now 2026). Which, on the whole, feels like the getting off easy compared to the laid-off federal workers, deported grad students, and countless other innocent people under attack.

It’s one of those moments where reality is too volatile and bizarre for fiction and futuring to capture. Not that all this hasn’t been warned of and predicted by many writers and thinkers for a long time. Rather I mean that, in the midst of such chaos, one has to stop and wait for some of the smoke to clear before assessing what the futures cone ahead looks like: what seems possible, plausible, probable, or even preferable.

I remember feeling some of this five years ago, when COVID was shuttering large swaths of our civilization, and then a few months later, when the BLM protests seemed to have unprecedented momentum. Both eventually passed. This time, however, events feel less like a state of exception and more like a permanent ratcheting down of the American project. There’s little mobilization now — just gaping as the train crashes around us. I suspect 2020 exhausted Americans’ capacity for collective action for a generation. Hopefully I’m wrong.

My next novel is set deep in such a period of decline and exhaustion — though not a self-inflicted one, like we are now barreling towards (perhaps I was too charitable). About half-way in I found an excuse to quote that Bertolt Brecht line: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” I went looking into Brecht’s work a bit while doing my manuscript revisions, and found that “dark times” were a regular theme in his poetry, as in this poem from the late 1930s “To Future Generations,” which feels dismally contemporary.

Really, I live in dark times!
Innocent words are foolish. An unfurrowed brow
Indicates apathy. He who laughs
Just hasn’t yet received
The terrible news.

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds!
He who quietly crosses the street
Is probably no longer within reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It’s true: I earn my living
But believe me: that’s only by accident. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
I just happen to have been spared. (If my luck runs out, I’m lost.)

Read the full thing here (translated by Terence Renaud).

So it was somewhat in a Brechtian mood that I skipped out on the last day of AWP last weekend and gave myself a day exploring downtown Los Angeles’s several wonderful art museums: The Broad, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and (seriously) the LA County Central Library. (All three of these places were free.) When I travel I always try to visit art museums. I find that much more stimulating in the long run than visiting historical sites, admiring old architecture, or eating supposedly local cuisine. Maybe I’m just on my way to many a sci-fi writer’s eventual destiny as an art critic.

Here are some of my favorite pieces:

I’ve been to The Broad before, back in 2018 or so. This was one of the pieces in their main collection that was new, and I really love it. To me it evokes the very relevant sense of living in a kind of historical twilight that nonetheless contains lushness and beauty. The mask in hand dates it, and the colors, glittery materials, and breaking out of the matting all speak to the dreamlike experience of contemporary struggles.

A really stunning landscape, made messy in a way that puts me in mind of litter on Mount Everest, and also of climate chaos, and environmental damage more broadly. But also, it reminds me of a photo I took of a Nepalese glacier some years ago: a creaking, cracking landscape made gray by gravel. That visual dinginess wasn’t human doing. Nature really is more dirty than pristine.

At the MOCA, they had a wonderful extended exhibit of work from the photorealism movement (which usually involves painting elaborately detailed canvases based on photographs). Titled “Ordinary People,” the exhibit emphasized the quiet radicalness of this movement in depicting working class lives as accurately as possible, but with great care.

As you move through the “Ordinary People” exhibit, the idea of photorealism starts to stretch and expand. This beautiful piece is based on a staged photograph, but the result is far from the Valdez street portraits above.

After finishing at the MOCA, I was looking for a place to hang out for a couple hours before my flight. I went to the LA County Library’s Central branch, a few blocks away, and was delighted to find that it too had contemporary art offerings. These included an incredible room full of improvised inventions devised by incarcerated people, along with attendant sketches and stories, written by an artist and prisoner named Angelo. I spent a good hour just reading these narratives (I highly recommend zooming in on the “Seagull Rocket” text above), which were ingenious and tragic at the same time. I left feeling like I’d been given a tour of a sort of America jugaad — and also very aware of the irony of a public Californian institution displaying such a beautiful anti-carceral message about all these people imprisoned by the state of California. I can’t help but feel like these are the sorts of moral contradictions that have made politics unparseable by a huge swath of the population, and thus brought us to this irrational moment we are in.

There was another room in the library dedicated to the larger theme of art about invention. The highlight was this wall of (often tongue-in-cheek) utopian patents. The above is just part of the larger display. As you can see the concepts range from “Expand Nature” and “Quiet Hospitals” to “A Machine to Purge Crappy People” and “Toast.” A delightful work of critical futuring.

Bonus: I saw this not in LA, but on a recent trip to the Mesa Contemporary Art Museum. I love it so much. Its title, its colors, its setting and busy sky all make it feel solarpunk adjacent, particularly the sort of neighborhood-focused solarpunk after which this newsletter is named. I’ve had it as my phone background for a couple weeks now, and I often find myself just staring at it.

Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• My friends T.K. Rex and Sarena Ulibarri both recently had beautifully illustrated stories in Tractor Beam. Seriously, you gotta click through at least for the pictures (and stay to read the stories).

• ASU MFA and fellow tall person Chloe Jensen has a recent story in, well, Story. It’s titled “My Sister’s Boyfriend.”

• Clarion friend Mary Thaler had a story in Carte Blanche: “Remission.”

• Geoff Ryman announced a new book due out later this year: Animals: A Tale of Terror.

• Denis Baden successfully launched her novel Murder in the Climate Assembly via Kickstarter. I got my copy and am excited to dig in. You can get the paperback or ebook here.

Esteemed neighbors, emissaries, ambassadors, and dignitaries, I write to you today not only as a statesman but as a scientist.

We in the city of Omelas have been exceedingly lucky in recent years. The wars, diseases, and financial instability that have rocked the world have so far passed us by. Partly that’s been due to prudent precautions and smart public investments, but it’s also true that our fine city benefits in unique ways from ancient, dearly-held customs.

This is the opening to my new flash fiction story, out today in Lightspeed Magazine: “An Omodest Proposal.” It’s quite short, and I’m quite proud of it, so please give it a read. You can also listen to it on the Lightspeed podcast.

This story is my contribution to a minor SFF tradition: the Omelas response story. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a classic 1973 story by Ursula K. LeGuin — in my opinion the greatest SFF writer of all time. LeGuin’s story describes a utopian city in vivid and thoughtful detail, and then reveals that, according to its inhabitants, this utopia’s wellbeing rests on the continuous suffering of a single, innocent child.

It’s a thought experiment of immense ambiguity. Is this apparent moral compromise acceptable? If not, what should one do about it? LeGuin leaves such questions as an exercise to the reader, and exercise they do. Over the last half century, “Omelas” has provoked many classroom discussions and essays and social media jokes.

It has also provoked other stories. Something about this story just makes writers want to parody or pay homage or otherwise riff on LeGuin’s core conceit. There’s N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” about trying to fix injustice instead of simply walking away. There’s P.H. Lee’s “A House by the Sea” imagining the adult lives of the suffering children. There’s John Holbo’s take on Omelan tourism. There’s Isabel J. Kim’s excellent story from a year ago, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole." My friend LP Kindred had a story in which the kid was instead a captive god, who is rescued by his lover. There was that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode that borrowed the Omelan conceit. Heck, I’m told there’s even a BTS video.

I myself have written a bit about Omelas on this newsletter before, coining the idea of “Omelian thinking” — the tendency to assume that better worlds or utopian futures must be the result of some horrible moral bargain.

And now I’m back with my own response story, “An Omodest Proposal” — the title of course a reference to both “Omelas” and Jonathan Swift’s famous satire “A Modest Proposal.” In this piece I don’t try to countermand LeGuin’s thought experiment (though I do, if the narrator is to be believed, settle one aspect of the ambiguity). Instead, I extend the scope. What would you do if Omelas offered to annex your town, fix all your society’s problems, give everyone a utopian lifestyle of peace and joy? How does expansion change the utilitarian calculus? Is utopia still utopia if it’s not an exception but the rule, if it’s everywhere, if it’s an empire?

Like all good Omelas stories, it’s a little bit wistful and a little bit mean. I hope folks find it a worthy addition to the genre.

It feels odd to write about utopias when in reality we are careening at top speed in the opposite direction. The evil in Omelas (if indeed you think there is one) is a subtle one: an evil of compromise, of ‘greater good,’ and also of apathy and cowardice. An evil of turning away. The evil now trying to tear apart the fabric of American society is not subtle at all. It’s brutish and noisy and brazen. The worst, most hateful and selfish and stupid people in the country are presently performing an oligarchic coup. They are doing away with the inconvenience of American democracy in order to put uppity workers and women and minorities back in their place. They told us they were going to do this, and people elected them anyway, but it’s still a coup. Very likely we are in just the first moments of a long reactionary rampage. We’re so, so far from utopia this week.

Still I do think there’s a parallel to be drawn. My story attempts to trace the way that, left unchecked, small evils get ambitious. If you normalize them, they will keep taking an inch, and then a yard, and then a mile. They’ll turn imperial. That’s what happened in America. Whether due to fascination or exhaustion or ignorance or indifference, we let the forces of fascism and reaction carve themselves a place in our polity. We turned away or walked away or just went on with our lives. We let this nasty little darkness fester. We let them get away with it. And now we’re reaping the consequences.

So if you see cops or border patrol or fashy-looking guys hauling some kid through the streets, toward a basement, or an ICE bus, or detention camp — don’t walk away. Don’t believe them when they say they’re doing this for your benefit, for the greater good, for 'common sense.’ Because pretty soon they’d like to haul off your neighbor, or your coworker, or you. It won’t just be the one kid.

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Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• To celebrate the recent publication of Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures (in which I have a story reprinted), Flame Tree Publishing is running a solarpunk art competition. The contest page includes definitions of solarpunk from many of the anthology contributors, including myself. Very cool to to see all these ways of conceiving of solarpunk gathered in one place. Check it out.

• The Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Contest has released its fourth volume of stories, each one with really beautiful art. These are consistently some of the most interesting and thoughtful solarpunk-adjacent stories gathered in one place. Give them a read.

• Fellow ASU author and very nice fellow Hayden Casey has a two book year ahead. First, his short story collection Show Me Where the Hurt Is comes out from Split/Lip Press in April. Then his debut novel A Harvest of Furies comes out from Lanterfish Press in the fall. Give his collect a preorder, and give Hayden a follow.

• Sci-fi friend and collaborator Corey Jae White has a recent story out in Strange Horizons, co-written with fellow Melbourne author Maddison Stoff. The story, “Crisis Actors,” was one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest. Give it a read.

• WTFutures has put out a call for past, ongoing, and upcoming projects involving youth exploring climate futures. The project team includes my friend Daniel Kaplan, of Plurality University. If you work at the intersection of youth, futures, and climate, check out the open call.

• Finally, I want to remember Nicolas Nova, a design scholar and futures thinker from Geneva who passed away suddenly at the very end of 2024. I had the pleasure to hang out with Nicolas last summer at a conference in Montreal, after knowing each other from the Near Future Lab Discord. He was an incredibly sharp and big-hearted guy, the only sensible person on his AI panel, and great fun to get dinner and drinks with. Here are a couple other tributes put out by folks who knew him better. He’ll be missed.

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Art Tour: Interior of St. Peters’s, Rome

The above image is a 1731 painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini, which I saw on display at the St. Louis Art Museum last summer.

If you liked this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

America should have a different healthcare system. Even the villains of that system, who cost us half a trillion dollars a year, agree. “No one would design a system like the one we have,” admitted the CEO of UnitedHealth Group. This just days after health insurance CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down, (allegedly) by modern day social bandit Luigi Mangione.

This killing was met with much ambivalence, and even a little glee, by the general public, which in turn provoked a wave of pearls clutched so hard they crumbled into dust. The media midwits who have rushed to defend health insurers and CEOs from the terrorism of Bluesky jokes and Facebook laugh reacts have been quick to argue that the assassination won’t do anything to improve the state of healthcare. This seems to me naive at best and deliberately consent-manufacturing at worst. After all, the last few weeks have seen more critical discussion of our private insurance system (by both the media and regular people) than any time since the the Democratic primary debates of 2019. Back then — before the Dem establishment rallied around the most health insurer-friendly candidate to drive Sanders out of the race — a single payer Medicare for All system (or at least some public option) seemed to really be on the table for America. And now the health reform imagination is booting up once again. One may not like it, but Luigi put health insurers on the rhetorical defensive and got people talking.

So let’s talk about it. To my mind — having worked for several years in healthcare nonprofits and spent several more campaigning for Medicare for All — there are three main ways that our current system makes life in America worse.

First, it’s expensive. Americans spend more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, and we get significantly worse care for our money. A lot of this is administrative bloat — paying the employees of all the various health insurance companies, and also the billing staff that every provider has to hire to deal with those companies. But a lot is profit extraction too (and enormous executive salaries/bonuses).

Second, the coverage is bad. To extract those profits, private insurers have to underdeliver. They need to deny claims, or refuse to cover more expensive drugs or procedures, or find other excuses to not actually cover the costs their customers are paying them to cover ($5k deductibles, having some providers be ‘out of network,’ etc.). And as a result, many people end up not getting the care they need — or they go bankrupt trying to stay alive. Those who have recently risen to the defense of private insurance love to parrot the PR line that “every system rations care.” But no other wealthy country’s system produces so much poverty, or makes itself so inaccessible to the poor. We avoid the European wait times the shills harp on about with a rationing system that distributes care to those with wealth and denies it to those without — as though that were a more just system than asking everyone to wait their turn.

Third, the patchwork, employer-based system creates precarity and power imbalances. For most Americans, every time we move or change jobs (or get fired!) we end up at least temporarily uninsured. One of my great fears is getting hit by a car during one of these lapses, and ending up saddled with a lifetime of medical debt. It’s just a constant low-level anxiety that everyone below the upper-middle class experiences on American soil. And having insurance tied to employers ties workers to bosses, particularly those with ongoing medical conditions. We would be more free to quit bad jobs — or standup to shitty managers, or strike — if losing a job didn’t literally put our health at risk. Many significant shifts in the class struggle are potentially locked behind a reform like Medicare for All.

America has had this rotten situation for so long, that fixing it feels more futuristic and far out than robots and moon-bases — even though we can literally drive to countries with much more humane systems. When I heard of the Thompson assassination, the first thing I thought of was Cory Doctorow’s novella Radicalized (found in his collection of the same name), in which angry Americans in a cancer support group turn to Mangione-style terrorism, and eventually win the healthcare reform that peaceful means have so far failed to deliver. This story seems to me much more usefully speculative than a lot of stuff written in the fantastical mode we call “science fiction,” featuring starships and sentient AIs and other such magicks. A single payer system would be a more profound change to most Americans’ lives than much of that technologically styled wizardry.

So I thought this might be a good time to share one of my own stories of a possible healthcare future. I wrote “The Flesh Trade,” which you can read below, some years ago, for a contest about the future of American healthcare. After that, there wasn’t a huge market for this kind of niche policy-oriented spec fic, so I decided to save it for a rainy day.

This story concerns itself with system redesign beyond the first layer of abolishing for-profit insurance. There are three top-level questions to designing a healthcare system:

1. Single-payer or multi-payer: does the state pay for healthcare with taxes, or do you have a patchwork system with many payers (i.e. insurance companies), to whom individuals pay premiums (or get premiums paid for them by employers, etc.)?

2. Single-player or multi-player: do all providers work for the payer(s) (a la the UK’s NHS), or do you have many privately employed or self-employed providers?

3. Service billing or empanelment: do providers / provider groups / hospitals get paid by billing the payer(s) for the services they provide (each patient visit, each medicine dispensed, each operation performed), or are they paid a lump sum to keep a bunch of people healthy and they try to do that as cheaply as possible?

That gives us lots of design space even within a single payer system. I’d be quite curious to see SF writers and design fiction practitioners take on exploring these options. In “The Flesh Trade,” I cover single-payer/multi-player/empanelment. I’d argue that this is a normatively better system than we currently have, by a wide margin, but, as usual, I find it still leaves plenty of room for competition and profit wrangling, particularly as global heating takes its toll on health…

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Short Story: “The Flesh Trade”

“We want Coronado,” I began.

It was a bold ask, and I knew she knew it. The neighborhood had consistently housed the cheapest, healthiest tranche of Medicare members in the Valley. Young artists and yoga coaches, biking to studios in the warehouse district, content to split cozy sharehouses until they got pregnant and petitioned for some retrodense McMansion in Ahwatukee. Fitness racks at every tram stop, vegan restaurants up and down N 7th Street, the best heat management around. Coronado was an empanelment goldmine, fifteen blocks wide. We wanted it back.

The Mayo-Abrazo negotiator, Diane Merlo, sized me up. “Tough sell for our providers. We have very deep roots in that community.”

“Roots? You bit it out of our northern border twelve years ago,” I said. “Then you plopped down a half-baked wellness center, so the fed audit wouldn’t notice that Banner has a full hospital a block away. We both know Phoenix is gerrymandered all to hell. But when I’m at conference cocktail parties, that’s the horror story that gets me laughs.”

“And yet, Ms. Gresten, members in Coronado haven’t complained to CMS. Maybe the Banner-Dignity brand isn’t a good fit for their lifestyle?”

A cheap shot, not a good start. Merlo stroked at her tablet. I worried I’d overplayed my hand. Then she looked up. “Anything else you want?”

I stopped holding my breath, sucked in chilly, sterile hospital air. A haboob was blowing, topsoil collapse in SoCal sending a billion pounds of dust tumbling east. Overworked air purifiers gave the conference room a chemical sweetness you could taste.

Once upon a time, before the feds took over the insurance business, you could just bet on who would be healthy and who would get sick, need care, cost money. Get healthy people on your rolls, kick costly ones off—or charge them more. People paid up either way, because life and death isn’t a market choice. Lots of money sloshed around healthcare then, and everyone got a cut: insurers, hospital groups like Merlo and I represented, pharma, medical device manufacturers, those doctors who advertised in now-extinct in-flight magazines.

But now, with everyone covered, empanelment was territorial. The feds paid monthly Medicare rates based on the patient’s medical history, demographics—a million metrics, crunched by algorithm. You kept patients in your coverage zone healthy, whatever it cost. Providers could tighten belts, sneak in convenience charges, but the rates were the rates, and regulators at the Center for Medicare Services made sure no one got squeezed out of care they needed, no matter how expensive.

So if Banner-Dignity wanted to get rich off single-payer healthcare, we had to know the deltas. Invest in neighborhoods that would get healthier, short the ones that would get sicker. Profit was the difference between how much the government thought each member’s care would cost, and the million daily dice rolls of reality.

This was meta-risk, and the only way to win was to predict the churn of culture- and climate-driven migrations, the future health of towns and neighborhoods, identity groups and subcultures—and predict it better than both the feds and our competitors.

So Merlo flicked an empanelment map onto our shared workspace, highlighted Coronado. Banner-Dignity and Mayo-Abrazo sliced up Phoenix and Tucson fine and twisted, like colorful squid fighting to the death. Outside the cities, rural provider groups held blocky splotches. And outside Arizona? Just the endless red of the MediCorps, the federal public provider option that reformers were using to push out the multi-player system state by state.

I rattled off border neighborhoods we hoped to grab when the CMS tweaked the map: Lawndale, Casitas Lindas, Papago Vista, down to shoring up our eastern flank with Maple-Ash, Date Palm Manor, Baseline-Hardy. Government algorithms were supposed to carve up the state to maximize member convenience, spread out patient loads, but “convenience” left a lot of gray area. Backroom agreements by hospital groups helped CMS settle the ambiguity.

“You’re a woman of conservative taste,” Merlo said. “Good housing, good services, high turnover, decent Provisioned Prosperity metrics. All sprawl-repaired in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Utilization costs have hovered seven points below capitation rates for decades. Of course, those rates are low for the demographics you’re getting, so you won’t be raking it in. Honestly, I expected a more ambitious package. Unless—don’t tell me you’re considering layoffs?”

She was taking the bait. I tried to act annoyed. “Nothing so dramatic. Our patient experience lab is planning a branding stir-up. We want a membership base that will appreciate our new look.”

Merlo’s smirk made me want to drag her outside to choke on the summer air. I’d braved dust storms and flash floods, snowbirds and parkour moms, lost cause right-wingers and vortex hippies—all to get the intel we had today. I preferred the field: trendcasting, chasing down costly hot spots. Making sure Banner-Dignity’s predictions models had the best inputs and biases around. That had been winter though, when you could go outside. For the summer, I was stuck in this conference room.

“These were our initial recommendations,” Merlo said, lighting up territories for Mayo-Abrazo to claim.

Her picks didn’t surprise me. They were after sedentary residents in middling housing stock—a standard Mayo play. Every year they over-recruited an army of physicians, fresh out of their first or second round of med school. Those they couldn’t use they made block docs. House calls, neighborhood fitness challenges—boring stuff. But block docs usually raised a hood’s fortunes, so Mayo was always hungry for new territory with uncompetitive housing. Somewhere to dump their next harvest of excess providers without breaking budget.

“We’ll need an additional adjustment if you want Coronado,” Merlo said. “Something similarly well positioned to compensate.”

This was it, the barbed line I needed her to swallow. I paused, then said, “We’d be willing to put Salt River Gardens on the table.”

“Interesting.” Merlo raised her eyebrows.

“We’ve tapped out our easy growth there,” I shrugged.

Her posture said she’d bought it. “Let’s run the numbers, see how all that scores, hm?”

We set algorithms to check the trade for hidden patterns or anomalies, calculate expected profit and strains on infrastructure. Then we had to run the draft proposal by the feds.

“So, Ashmi,” she used my first name, intentionally familiar. “Have you thought about what you’ll do if MediCorps comes here?”

It was a common question these days—last days in Saigon style. I shrugged. “Move, I guess. Lots of firms are experimenting with meta-risk speculation. Art dealers, media collectives, branding innovators. Health isn’t my passion, and working in a single-player system doesn’t sound fun. I’m here for the competition.”

“Aren’t we all?” Merlo said. “With algos outperforming markets a little more each year, capitalism’s shunk so small they can drown it in a bathtub. Now enterprise is dominated by data-minded thrill seekers—like us.”

“What about you?” I asked, then added: “Diane.”

“Actually, I’m hopeful Mayo can stay private. There’s a contingent in Washington keen to keep one ‘laboratory of democracy’ running. They won’t let Arizona stay multi-player, but they might let one provider group keep a private monopoly. As a calibration measure.”

“A monopoly? Why not just leave it market?” This was all news to me. Mayo must have lobbyists bringing them intel—an illegal but hard to police practice.

“That’d be impolitic, I guess. But budget hawks want to see how much profit we can eek out, then tick down MediCorps’ funding accordingly.”

“How do you know Mayo-Abrazo is going to be the single private player?” I asked, annoyed at the presumption.

Merlo looked at me pityingly. “Who else would it be? We’re a very storied brand.”

“Are mergers in the works?” I might as well try to find out what I was in for.

“Oh, I don’t know the details. I think if the plan goes through, CMS will simply assign us the whole state as empanelment territory over the next couple cycles. Rather makes what we’re doing today feel a bit irrelevant, don’t you think?”

“Are you trying to demoralize me?” I fumed.

“Not at all!” Merlo looked genuinely surprised. “No, sorry, I skipped the good bit. What I’m getting at, Ms. Gresten, is that you should come work for me.”

I almost choked.

“Banner-Dignity’s inputs have performed well since you came on,” she explained. “I could use you as a field researcher. Let you stick to what you’re good at, and we can forget about the gerrymandering, the flesh trade.”

I had come expecting Merlo to maybe slip me a bad deal—but not poach me. Was this some trick to get my guard down? What if it wasn’t?

I liked my work. I got to explore the city, talk to people, crunch numbers, solve puzzles. Once I ran down an allergy spike to an unreported chemical spill, got it cleaned up. Actually improved some patients lives there, which felt nice.

Maybe I could keep hotspotting for Mayo or CMS if they took over. But then I’d be just like everyone else: workaday rank-and-file, collectively tapping the ball down the road of provisioned prosperity. I liked games zero sum. I wanted to keep scoring goals.

And I was going to score one today. I’d shown weakness to pique Mayo’s greed, and if the draft panned out, I would feed them territory that was about to go down hard. Salt River Gardens had avoided the worst of the Valley’s heat island for decades. But I’d walked the sludgy Salt River with a wet-bulb sensor rig. I knew that boutique real estate better than anyone, and my models showed a cascade of climate collapse ahead. Overdevelopment to the south would torque the urban-thermodynamics just enough to wipe away the neighborhood’s oasis. The subdivisions would have to scramble to put up shades and A/C corridors. Whatever hospital group covered it would be taking in hundreds of extra heat victims in a few years. It was not worth Coronado, not by a long shot.

This was my coup, my hard short. I knew the future, and Merlo didn’t. But if they wanted all the territory anyway, my bets just didn’t matter.

A notification popped up on our workspace. The feds had signed off on our draft.

“A pleasure doing business with you,” Merlo said. “Whatever happens in the next year, there’s a spot on my team if you want it.”

“I’ll walk you out.”

We shuffled past modular taupe offices, down stairs, through the highly oxygenated jungle of the first floor waiting room. Immuno-grouped patients sprawled on beds of soft moss. Then out into the plastic tunnel, quivering with the pelting dust. The sky was a moldy, uncanny orange. Neither of us looked up. Summer was just like this: if not the dust, the boiling sun, weeks above 120 F.

I stopped Merlo as she entered the tunnel.

“You said you were here for the competition, like me?” It came out like a question. “Will you miss the game if Mayo takes over?”

“Oh, there would still be competition,” Merlo said. “Us versus CMS, with stakes of survival every time we don’t beat their models. Chess instead of Risk. And as the single player, we wouldn’t just bet on the meta-risk. We’d identify and mitigate it. Which means that we’d actually be improving people’s lives.”

“You sound like you’re pitching MediCorps takeover as much as Mayo-Abrazo,” I said.

“What can I say?” She waved at the sky. “It’s hot. I’m tired of fighting over the shade.”

She started walking again.

I thought of the allergy spike I’d helped clear up, the grateful cards that came to my office. Maybe that could be enough.

“Wait,” I said. Here there were few cameras; the microphones would be whited by the wind. I stepped close, just in case. “Salt River Gardens. My intel says...it’s going to get bad. That’s why we traded it. But if you invest now, people there might be okay.”

Merlo’s eyebrows went up. She nodded.

“Thank you,” she said. And that was it. She walked off into the risky world.

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2024 Award Eligibility

Nominations are open or soon opening for various SFF awards (such as the Hugos and the Nebulas), and I once again have two pieces that are eligible in the Best Short Story categories:

“The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” appeared in Escape Pod. In this followup to my 2023 story “The Uncool Hunters,” creative consultant extraordinaire Rocky Cornelius is back to help with the launch of a post-apocalyptic-themed boutique grocery in quake-rocked LA — until things get a little too post-apocalyptic…

“The Weather Out There” appeared in Long Now Ideas. What would it be like to talk to faraway aliens, messages taking decades to cross the murk of deep space? What would it feel like if, one day, they went silent?

If you are the nominating sort, I’d be honored if you included them in your nominations ballot. You can also help by telling your friends about them, or sharing them on social media. If you’re a SFWA member, you can also give these a like in the Nebula Reading List. Thank you for the support.

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Art Tour: Crow and Girl

I’ve spotted work by this artist in my neighborhood before. This one is on a local bar/cafe. I asked the proprietor who the artist was, and he told me Nathan Beddington. Unfortunately, web searches have so far failed to turn up such an artist. Will update you if I find out more…

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

Some years ago, inspired by an anthology call, I co-wrote a story about survival and resistance under American fascism. Set in a near-future Idaho, the story features a courier of DIY meds from a solarpunk-esque enclave, who finds herself caught between two “twinned bodies of social violence”: an ecofash religious gang and a corrupt and surveillance-empowered police state.

The story, titled “In the Storm, a Fire,” was a collaboration with with my good friend and fellow solarpunk old guard Jay Springett. It was published in the 2020 ebook anthology And Lately, the Sun: Speculative fictions for a climate-thrashed world, where it was long-listed for the BSFA award and was a short story semifinalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards. It was a great volume to be included in, but for years now the story has not had a place where it lives online.

So this month, because it seems sadly timely, Jay and I are posting the full story to our respective sites/newsletters. I’ve put it here, below the fold — after a few updates and recommendations. It’s a longer story, so you’ll probably have to click through to read the whole thing.

We wrote this during the first Trump administration, and it’s hard to know now how much still maps onto our present, disastrous political landscape. People quibble about whether Trump’s movement is fascist or some other flavor of authoritarian, whether he’s channeling a violently reactionary turn or just happens to be the beneficiary of widespread frustration with prices. But I’ve seen too many big pickups driving around Mesa with huge “Trump Won” flags to write off the fascist impulse entirely. And revisiting this story, much of it still feels all too relevant.

There are a few references in the story that history has passed by — the enclave having downshifted in “the early 20s” now seems hopelessly optimistic, for instance. “Snapchat demagogue” should now probably be “TikTok demagogue.” Etc. We’ve decided to leave these as is, and not attempt to update the story for the particulars of a future as seen from 2024, which are only slightly less likely to be stale by the time a future actually arrives.

But I still hold to the broad sketch of “fascism with American characteristics” at the heart of this story: a politics defined by unrestrained pursuit of a broad array of right wing grievances, synthesizing white supremacy, corpo-state collusion, police militarism, Christian sectarianism, edgelord meme culture, tradwife RETVRNism, and so on. We pay particular attention to green-brown ‘asperity’ ecofascism, a response to climate collapse that turns punitive and exclusionary, that revels in monocultures and exacerbates the suffering of the vulnerable. Today, seeing how much the American right remains captured by climate denial, I’m not sure how big a constituency this set of ideas has. But the tendency is definitely out there.

One last word of reflection: this story is not meant to be “dystopian.” To me dystopia implies a settled and permanent state of affairs. In real life fascist and authoritarian regimes rarely last long, and never last forever. A lot of people get hurt along the way, but still they’re often brittle. In this story we see cracks starting to show. In a conversation I had with fellow futures person Paul Graham Raven (see below), we struck upon the idea that building a better world is just “dystopia in its inevitable process of failure.” However dark this chapter of American history might be, it’s not the end of the story.

Keep reading below, or pop over to Jay’s site, and enjoy “In the Storm, a Fire.”

News, Reviews + Miscellany

• About a year ago I did a conversation with Paul Graham Raven, which ended up scuttled by poor sound quality. But PGR has now put a transcript of the discussion up on his Worldbuilding.Agency. You can find part one here (in which we discuss the shifting socio-historical role of science fiction, among other things) and part two here (in which we cover the Lucas Plan, jet packs, and the aforementioned “dystopia in its inevitable process of failure”). Very much worth subscribing to get at this and the rest of PGR’s great content.

• I was coauthor in this paper in Climate Policy, “Carbon removal for a just transition.” Most of the credit belongs to my fellow authors, Duncan McLaren, Holly Caggiano, Celina Scott-Buechler, and particularly Sara Nawaz of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, who led the charge and shepherded us through the peer review process. The paper makes the case that the industrial buildout of carbon removal technology, required to limit planetary heating, should follow a just transition model that uses participatory planning processes, looks beyond private ownership models, and holds historical emitters responsible without putting them in charge.

• My friends at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination asked me to write a short piece for their Imaginary Papers quarterly newsletter about the Northern Lights book and project that came out of my 2023 time in Sweden.

• My story “Any Percent” has been making some rounds recently, kicked off by this MetaFilter post, which pairs it with the wonderful song “Fixer Upper” by Gracie Petrie. From there it got shared on Andy Baio’s Waxy.org and written up in Web Curios. The latter speculated that it must be optioned for film/tv already as it’s “pure cinema,” but the option, I am excited to say, remains available! 👀

• Also my story “Sunshine State” (coauthored with Adam Flynn, and also, imho, pure cinema) was featured in this excellent video and post from Oregon State University about “What is a Protagonist in Cli-Fi?” This is a really nice series of accessible literary teaching materials, and very recommended.

• You may recall that my story “The Mammoth Steps” was reprinted a couple years back (in 02022) by the Long Now Foundation (who just recently published another of my stories). Now that mammoth story has been included in the first edition of Long Now’s new annual journal, Pace Layers.

  

  It’s a lovely volume, divided into sections based on, of course, Steward Brand’s famous pace layers graph. You can get your copy here.

  

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Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray’s book Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States comes out this week. Excited to get my copy!

• A.E. Marling has released a new solarpunk novel, Missing Mermaid, about a woman who gave up her legs to become a mermaid, surgically, then goes missing. It’s also got cities competing on carbon drawdown with DAC plants, and other crunchy solarpunk stuff. I love how Alan combines two of my favorite things, utopian futurity and detective plots (you may recall his last book was Murder in the Tool Library). His ebooks are just a couple bucks, so please give them a read.

• T.K. Rex has a flash piece in The Fabulist, “Everything I Hate About the Ninety-Two Foot Woman Next Door.” Title really says it all there.

• Niv Sekar has a story in Joyland, “Split Tongue” that’s also worth a read.

• I’ve recently gotten to know fellow Phoenix-based SFWA member Conrad Miszuk, who has a great satirical audio drama podcast, Kakos Industries.

• And last but very much not least, over at the Cosmic Mystery Club, CY wrote about one of the trailblazers of the cosmic mystery form: Twin Peaks.

Art Tour: Turner’s Burning Tower

Years ago I saw a marvelous exhibit of J M W Turner paintings at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco. They’ve been favorites of mine ever since, particularly his paintings featuring fire, such as the one I’ve included here at the top. I love the way his fires smear into the atmosphere and landscape to make it all feel like one entangled, churning thing. The fire not as an exception but as simply making visible the disturbance already there.

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“In the Storm, a Fire”

by Andrew Dana Hudson and Jay Springett

The fire looked recent. The storm must have doused the flames just too late. Chani pulled her bike to a stop, smelling soggy ash, hanging in the breathless air. She could see charred pews, hymnal pages scattered by the wind. A porcelain-white Jesus looked mournfully out of the wreckage.

The Catholic church—was “Catholic” still right?—stood just outside urban Boise. Chani walked around the blackened beams, interrupting the hazy sky like the ribcage of a giant, burnt beast—then stopped short. On the picket fence, graffiti scrawled red and black: “JEZ LOVER” on one side of the gate, “BABY KILLER” on the other.

“On no...” Chani said.

A croak on the air responded: “Help!”

Her nurse’s training kicked in. She stopped rubbernecking and scanned for survivors. Propped up against a gnarled scarf of a tree, she saw the black-clothed slump of a man. 

She rushed to him, taking in the details: bald head, damp black shirt missing its dog collar, two extremely broken legs.

“Father Edward!” Chani cried. She’d expected to meet the old priest today—half the illegal meds in her pack were contraceptives he helped distribute—but not like this.

“Sorry I’m in a state,” he wheezed. “Never should’ve let those Juniper Boys in.”

“Who?” But Chani already knew the answer. “Fash?”

Father Edward nodded. “Jared Pine’s thugs. Enviro-Christian fundamentalists, or so they call themselves. ‘Stewards of holy asperity.’” Father Edward seemed keen to gush his story. “Should’ve guessed those shirts were more brown than green.” 

“Who’s Jared Pine?” Chani began to run through the basic first aid checks she’d learned. She wanted to keep him talking. “He named his posse ‘the Juniper Boys’? Yikes.”

“Snapchat demagogue. Before your time.” Father Edward coughed. “I think he was a real player in state politics once, but the AmNats overtook his ambitions. I guess he’s been playing at the edges of the militias and PVP scenes ever since.”

“And he just showed up?”

“Some people called wanting to rent the sanctuary for meetings, asked me to let them in late. When they arrived Pine was with them, and...well, someone had told him about the pills.”

Chani spared a glance at her pack. “That’s very bad,” she said.

“You know, last month Frannie lectured me about op-sec, but I said, ‘It’s a church. Even with the schism, we have to have a little faith in people.’ Serves me right.”

Chani gave him water and considered her options. He was tough to have survived the battering storm. She visualized the coded order sheet for the pharmaceuticals hidden in the jars of fruit preserves in her backpack: drugs for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's. Birth control pills. No pain killers—Frannie, her boss, refused to do opiates.

If she got him home to Greenwood, out in the burbs, folks at Frannie’s lab could probably set his legs right. But moving him herself seemed like a bad idea, even if she could carry him on her bike.

The other option was a hospital in Boise.

“Do you have insurance?” she asked. “We have to call an ambulance.”

“The diocese will pay...I think.” His voice was breaking again. “Would have hailed one myself, but…my arms.”

Along with the legs, both Edward’s shoulders were dislocated. His hands sat rag doll in his lap. Chani could call an ambulance through her own interface, but doing so would leave a record that would put the lab at risk. Instead she delicately felt his pockets, tugged out and unrolled a black wafer of glass. The phone was locked with a gesture print code.

“You have to do it,” she said. “They can’t know I was here. Which means you need to open your phone. Which means, unless you have another way, I’m going to have to pop your arms back in. Okay?”

She used that authoritative nurse’s voice, full of no-nonsense compassion. Edward grimaced, then nodded.

With her dad’s pocket knife, Chani sliced off the priest’s black clergy shirt. No cuts or bruising on the chest. These injuries were meant to be painful, not permanent—the kind of cruelty the gangs inflicted, knowing police would ignore anyone merely ‘roughed up.’

“One thing you should know,” Edward said as Chani rolled a strip of his shirt for him to bite down on. “They asked where I got the pills, my supplier. It’s pretty hazy—I was passing out after the second leg—but...I think I told them.”

“Also very bad,” Chani said. “But one thing at a time.”

She knelt by his right shoulder. She had only done this before on practice dummies. She muttered the instructions she’d memorized.

“On three,” she said. “One. Two—”

She felt the ball of the humerus snap into the shoulder socket. Edward screamed into the gag.

The other arm was harder. After two tries Edward spit out the gag and panted. They were both dripping with sweat. She got it on the third attempt. Edward’s shout rippled through the still air.

#

The adrenaline of doing crash medicine had made time slow down. Now it raced past her. The next few minutes were a blur. Edward wincingly opened his phone and dialed 911. As he pleaded with the glitchy, unsympathetic voice of Alexa, a man appeared—a neighbor, summoned by the priest’s hollering. Chani was suspicious that he chose this moment to investigate, and not while the church was burning, nor while Edward called for help through the night. But he carried a rifle, and his presence, looming and stone-faced, made Chani flinch on her plan to bug out before the ambulance arrived.

Then the medi-cops were there, in their black tactical vests. They loaded Father Edward—his eyes apologetic—into the ambulance, took Chani’s citizen number and statement. She lied through her teeth about why she was there, but her cover seemed to pass. They scanned her bike interface and left.

Chani desperately wanted to flee home, tell Frannie about the hole blown in their operation, but she knew one of the specks in the sky had to be a police drone, floated over to watch her movements. Acting spooked might connect the dots for the cops, if they shared Pine’s intel. And besides, the pills were too precious to waste—at the very least she needed to hand them off to someone they could trust.

So, with no better options, she got back on the bike and pedaled on to her next stop. The sun blazed. She was suddenly exhausted. She blinked on her share bike’s assist motor, paying the nominal fee to use the power she’d stored up with her sweat.

She wound back to the riparian greenway, with its intact bike path. It was cooler there, even as the morning got hot; the dappled sunlight dancing across the bike path, surreally calm after the crisis at the church. Then the interface in her vision informed her that her share bike was logging her onto the city grid, and she was instantly overwhelmed by advertising. Her earbuds blared. The scratched display-skin on her bike crawled with photos of the latest cycling styles. Her contacts clicked over too, and transparent ghost cyclists streamed by on brand new fab designs. The experience was finely tuned to make her feel bad about the corporate clunker she was on.

Chani immediately paid the fee for a few hours of visual respite, and was left with only occasional flickers of propaganda, which she couldn’t opt out of: slogans and memes mapped onto the trees. “Withdrawal: A More Moral Freedom,” one said. “Asperity Preserves America for a New Generation,” said another. Chani gave the ghost-signs the finger.

The lush, old greenbelt blurred into a grid of tree-and-high-grass monoculture: asperity rewilding, or fash-forest as Frannie called it. She lost more time walking her bike around spots where saplings had been ripped from the thin soil of broken urbanite by the previous night’s storm. “I don’t know how you kids just shake those things off,” Frannie had said that morning when Chani had rolled in, sopping from the last of the rain.

She crossed the Boise River, fragrant with stormwater, and took Fairview downtown. The capitol loomed, bedecked with “Our Idaho” banners and the 44-starred flag. At the farmer’s market, young, happy, white people shuffled from shops to restaurants. It was that bubble of normalcy fascism preserved. Construction cranes raised luxury condos, power-hungry vertical farms, and solar arrays to power both. “Everything is pregnant with its opposite,” Chani recalled Frannie saying, and so the ‘harsh conditions’ demanded by asperity of course implied great ease and comfort for a favored class.

She wheeled through the lively crowds, passing perfect stalls selling ‘perfect’ foods, state-curated to the ecological tastes of the upper class: C4-pathway grains and ‘unwasteable’ gene-edited fruit. Chani found her contact at a booth selling cheese and honey.

“Chani! I was worried I wasn’t going to see you today,” Kayla said. She was a middle-aged millennial, but, with dyed black hair and meticulous makeup, she passed for 30. This wasn’t vanity, Chani knew, but self-preservation. Asperity was unkind to the elderly.

“Hectic morning, you know how it is,” Chani said. She opened her pack of jars, pulled out a stack of pickled plums hiding drugs that kept Alzheimer's at bay. Kayla’s face lit up with gratitude.

“Folks are really going to appreciate these,” Kayla said. “My mother especially. I know she’s been running low.”

“Kayla, listen. I have extra today, of some, uh, different varieties,” Chani said carefully. Around them the market bustled. “Would you want to take them off my hands? Free of charge, of course.”

Kayla’s eyes flickered.

“That’s mighty kind of you, but my customers are quite particular.” Kayla could tell something was wrong, Chani saw, and wasn’t going to risk carrying the Schedule 1 contraceptive pills. Kayla scanned the market again. “George at the peanut shop enjoys all sorts of fruit.”

Frannie would kill her for dropping the pills with an unknown, unvetted contact, but Chani didn’t see a better option. She knew the place, a couple of blocks away. She pedalled out of the market, picking up speed.

Rounding a corner, Chani felt her bike shudder. The wheels seized up, and she lurched over the handlebars. Her backpack crunched on the pavement.

Chani groaned. Pedestrians stepped forward to help, and then quickly shrunk back. Her bike’s display skin was flashing red and blue. Then her earbuds blared with sirens. Her vision swirled and went black. All she could see was blinding white text: STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

This was the last thing Chani wanted to do. She clawed the contacts out of her eyes, flicked them into the sweet syrup bleeding from her canvass pack. Protein-printed, they would melt away to nothing. She pulled out her earbuds, flung them away. They were pumping clattering noises designed to dizzy and disorient, still audible from yards away. Chani tried to find her feet, and for a moment confronted the world blissfully unaugmented. But it was too late to run. 

The pedestrians she’d seen moments ago had magically disappeared. Instead, three young men in off-green shirts were walking towards her. An older man stood behind her, grinning as he blocked her exit with a stick. Something about his flat face was familiar.

The first jackboot came down on her wrist, and she collapsed on the porous pavement. Several more blows struck her legs and thighs. Unsure where the men were, she curled into a ball, protecting her major organs. She heard shouting, the clink of broken glass, and then the beating stopped. More footsteps and now low voices. She lay still for a while, since that seemed to be working, taking long, painful breaths until she heard the hum of an electric vehicle pulling away. She looked up.

The silhouettes of two men were peering down at her. They wore all black—cops. Chani wondered: had they really arrived just after her beating, or had they simply sat back and watched?

#

In the back of the police cruiser a shitty virtual assistant barked out her rights though speakers in the partition. She was being held under “social questioning,” which meant she had no rights, but, the voice assured her, she wasn’t under arrest. Her detainment would have no effect on her citizenship score—though what she said and did while detained might. The plastic seats burned from baking in the sun. She ached from the kicking, and her wrist was ballooning to the size of a grapefruit. She flexed and rolled her hand inside the handcuffs. Not broken, just extremely messed up. The cuffs sensed her movement and squeezed back.

The booking office ran with fine-tuned bureaucratic efficiency. Everyone wore headsets, the station’s commanding intelligence issuing micro-task after micro-task. Nobody here thought for themselves. She was processed by a young lady with a long hash number tattooed on her arm—a party member as well as a cop. Chani tried to control her breathing, kept her responses short. She focused on the numbers, reflecting on the sheer historical audacity of this memetic co-option. This stupid woman wore her dehumanization on her skin as a point of pride.

“Your shirt, now in police custody, contains fibers that are non-recyclable. Under Green Fund Code 4.29 Subsection C, it will be sent to the municipal plant for secure digestion.”

Chani winced. It was an old shirt, twenty-teens maybe, but its technical fabrics were of the highest quality: anti-odor, anti-rip, fireproof, though she’d never tested it. Even a lifetime guarantee. It had been her father’s, and he’d retailored it for her sixteenth birthday, two months before he’d been camped. But those unfortunate enough to have contact with the police, particularly poor people, were not allowed to have nice things.

Her handcuffs clicked open, and she was directed to strip where she stood in the plastic processing booth. She was given the same standard-issue grey clothes that came in the U.N. Met Needs boxes that USAID spread everywhere to mollify the refugee millions. Then she sat alone waiting for questioning. The room was air conditioned, and goosebumps pickled her forearms. It was refreshing, she had to admit. Maybe the AC was the good cop.

The cop who came to interrogate her had no party tattoos, but wore a party pin on his lapel. ‘Flare,’ Frannie called it.

“Chester isn’t it?” the cop said. Chani scoffed. That wasn’t even her deadname. He just wanted her off balance. Chani waited for the other shoe to drop, and sure enough the cop performatively checked his tablet. “My mistake. Chani. That was decent work you did with the priest. Med team say you relocated both his shoulders very cleanly. That’s an expensive procedure, lot of liability if it goes wrong. Not sure I would’ve had the guts to try that at your age. Or the know-how.”

“I did some nurse’s training after high school,” Chani said. Hiding it seemed pointless. Better to save her lies for when they were absolutely necessary.

“Really...” The cop drew out the word. “You don’t have any certifications. You know, it’s important that the nation know what its citizens can contribute. Are you finding ways to make your training useful up in—where do you live again?”

“Eagle.”

“Right, Eagle. You know I heard you people have a less patriotic nickname for it. What do you call it again?”

“Greenwood.” This patronizing ritual was exhausting. It was probably meant to be. 

Greenwood wasn’t like the other suburbs. It had been one of the first communities to downshift in the early 20’s, densifying housing and filling empty lots with open orchards and perennial food production. And when the fash won the Federal, it had retained some autonomy: building infrastructure of resistance, cutting off the infrastructure of control. Chani’s dad had moved them a thousand miles to be there when she was little. Getting out of the country had been dangerous, then—still was. Better to be dug in, he’d decided, and Greenwood was where he’d found to dig. 

“Right. That’s a long bike ride to downtown. That church isn’t exactly on your way. Why were you visiting Father Edward?”

“Just saying hi. It’s a good place to stop and cool off on my rides.”

“That’s funny. I just talked to him. He said he didn’t know you.”

Fucking prisoner’s dilemma bullshit. There hadn’t been a chance to get their stories straight. She didn’t say anything.

“Are you sure there wasn’t any other reason you were at the church?”

“I’m sure. Shouldn’t you be after the people who burned the place down?”

She had hoped to distract her interrogator, but instead he looked pleased.

“Mr. Pine already came in himself and cleared up that misunderstanding. Bit of a theological dispute with your Jesuit pal there, which unfortunately got out of hand. Then the big storm, a lightning strike. Unlucky coincidence. Not the kind of thing we usually like to insert ourselves into, especially since they were leveling some pretty serious accusations. Distributing illegal drugs out of a church. Would you know anything about that?”

“Nope,” Chani said. She was boiling inside. The fash and the cops: twin bodies of social violence, orbiting around each other, never touching but always in sync.

“So where are the drugs, Chani?” The cop was mild.

“I don’t know,” Chani said. Technically true, in case they had some kind of polygraph camera in the walls, like in cop shows. Then she wondered if those cameras could pick up on thoughts like ‘technically true’.

The cop set a baggie on the table. Some of the contraceptive pills from her pack, Chani guessed. A little token of evidence from the Juniper Boys to excuse their crimes at the church, while they kept the rest of what they stole for themselves. Jared Pine probably had mistresses he didn’t want getting knocked up. Frannie always said the biggest moralizers were the biggest hypocrites.

“What do you think we’ll find when we examine your bike’s location history?” the cop asked. That stupid piece of rolling malware. She thought of the cops moving on Greenwood, tracing her steps back to Frannie.

The cop sensed her weakness and softened to win her over.

“Look,” he said. “We don’t care about a runner. We want the source. We have to get this DIY junk off the streets. It’s not safe for people and you know it.”

He waited through more of her silence.

“Why don’t we get that hand looked at?” he pressed. “Pro bono. You can see the difference a real hospital makes, maybe think over getting that nursing credential.”

Her wrist throbbed. Chani hated everything about this situation, but she wasn’t going to turn down his offer.

#

The hospital was clean and shiny, of course, with calming murals and luxurious furniture. No wait, since few could afford to be there. A doctor looked over her bruises, wrapped her wrist, gave her a pain killer, which she pocketed. Then she was left to stew.

Chani thought of the first time she ran meds for Frannie. “The stuff we make isn’t what they deserve,” the old woman had said. “They deserve to go to a real hospital, with drugs that work without costing a mortgage payment. Instead they’ll take crap we cook with bike parts and printers because it’s better than getting broke, dead or pregnant.”

Chani remembered going to a ‘real hospital’ when she was little, but not since. Hospitals were for people with insurance, and insurance was for people with corporate jobs, who didn’t mind living in the spotlight of fascist health surveillance. The nursing classes she’d taken after high school had been more concerned with channeling useful people into the military or militias—not an experience of education.
So with morbid interest Chani wandered around the hospital. The halls and rooms had cameras; the exits were controlled by guards. There was no reason to lock her down. Nurses smiled thinly at her as they bustled by. Healthcare was a means by which the state extracted compliance from the disobedient, so the staff was probably used to seeing people in her predicament.

In a room looking out on Military Reserve Park, she found the priest. He reclined on a plastic-wrapped mattress, legs suspended in blocks of grainy gelatin. His black clothes were piled in tatters on the nightstand. His wrists were zip-tied to the bed frame.

It occurred to Chani that they were probably being recorded, that the cops were letting her roam precisely to hear what she or Father Edward might let slip if they talked again. Still, she stepped into the room.

“Legs look set. How are the shoulders?”

“Sore.” Edward took in her gray clothes, the compression webbing on her wrist. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this.”

“Well, I’m sorry Jared Pine burned down your church,” Chani said. She did feel a bit guilty, since she’d been the one bringing him the contraceptive pills. “And about the bills from this, and everything.”

“God works in mysterious ways, probably,” Edward chuckled. Chani wondered what pain killers they’d put him on. “Anyhow, don’t worry about me. The diocese crowdfunds have already started collecting. You should watch out for yourself, being so off the grid. Knowing your neighbors is good, but when you get in trouble away from home it’s better if a big network has your back.”

“Cops said Pine blamed the fire on a lightning strike,” Chani said. “Are they really going to let him off?”

Edward sighed. “I think this is all a game to Pine. He’s of that middle generation that had no sense of progress and no emergency to face, so it’s just culture war all the way down, with no rules and no stakes. Not the worst kind of fascist, but maybe the cruelest. I remember how he postured in front of his young followers. I told him he’d need to find a new bit soon. It wouldn’t work out for him, getting old while preaching about generational vengeance, the coming American youth state. That’s when he had them do this to me.”

Chani remembered the priest’s twisted legs and the black bones of his church, both left out in the rain.

“Seems like more than a ‘theological dispute’ then,” she said. “Didn’t realize Cath politics got so violent.”

“You’d be surprised,” Edward said. “You might be too young to remember, but dozens died after the Boston Edict. It’s never good to have two popes. It always means war. Now we have—what?—four, at least? In Europe, it’s simpler; the divides are old and understood. And the Southern Churches are united in going their own way. But here, it’s messy. For people like Pine, the Jesuit Pope’s dying encyclical on reproductive justice was just an excuse to turn on fellows they’d always considered apostates.” Edward shifted to look at her, winced. “Catholicism is supposed to mean universal, but now it’s just another crux of resentment. The middle class, forever eating self.” 

“‘Fascism with American Characteristics,’” Chani quoted, wryly. Then, with no more politics to dissect, she felt the great, dull sorrow, always thumping beneath her survival-cynicism. “On the bright side, I hear the camps are big on uniting families. Collect the whole set, you know? So maybe I’ll see my dad.”

Father Edward flexed out the fingers on his bound hand, and Chani, not knowing what else to do, took it in her own. He looked her dead in the eyes. 

“Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on Earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.”

Chani didn’t know what to make of that, but somehow she felt buoyed.

#

She stayed with the priest a while. He prayed, she listened. Eventually a nurse poked in. “You’re wanted in the lobby,” she said. The polite phrasing struck Chani as funny. As if she had a choice in the matter.

Two new cops waited for her, hands resting on holstered tasers. Without a word they gripped her upper arms and marched her to the exit. Chani stumbled along, feeling the full weight of the day’s catastrophe. Was she about to get indentured until she cooperated? If she did cooperate, wouldn’t that just get her friends camped as well? She hated the idea of the brilliant permaculturists of Greenwood spending their days planting fash-forest on some superfund site.

Out the door, into sickening afternoon heat. Chani looked around for the police car but didn’t see one. Then the grips on her arms tightened, and she was shoved forward, towards a big van covered in cheap, scratched solar panels. The van’s back doors opened, and Chani sprawled inside, rolling painfully as the vehicle peeled away from the curb.

“You ever heard of the Church Fire Problem, child?”

Now Chani recognized the grinning man from the street as Jared Pine. Her dad had made her watch documentaries on the culture wars, and Pine’s flat, angry face had appeared more than once. Now he sat on the van’s unpadded bench, thinner, graying, skin leathered, but basically the same young man who’d screamed into his bedroom webcam about “Christ, Land, and Young Blood.” He held his cedar wood stick like a long truncheon and rapped her spine to force her deeper into the van.

Chani glared at him. She’d been beat up, bounced around by a system that gave her no agency. She was scared for Frannie, for Greenwood, for the people who needed the medicine she’d meant to deliver. Maybe they were getting arrested right now. And all of it was Jared Pine’s fault.

“Fuck you!” she exploded. “You fash garbage! What now? Going to have someone beat me up again? Fuck. You.”

Pine smiled with the edges of his mouth. He leaned back and buckled his seatbelt. Then he tapped twice on the driver’s partition with the end of his stick.

The van lurched, and Chani slammed into the bench. The driver cut the wheel the other way, and she crashed hard into the opposite side. Then the van’s brakes locked, and Chani rolled, forehead smacking the plexiglas partition.

She groaned, eyes watering from the pain. Pine tapped the partition again, and the swerving stopped.

“Not very talkative now are you? Just a moment ago you were effing and blinding. I wonder which toxic half you get that from, huh? Sit.” 

Chani sullenly took a seat on the bench opposite him.

“The Church Fire Problem,” he repeated, biting out each word. “Once upon a time churches burned down a lot. Not on purpose, mind you, but because they were tall wooden buildings filled with candles, cloth and paper. Flammable as an oil drum, whoosh! But when a church burned down, the community would rally around and rebuild it. And more importantly, they rebuilt to fit the needs of the congregation.”

Pine talked with the broken cadence of someone used to getting recorded and edited. Chani didn’t want to hear the sermon, but letting him talk let her catch her breath, comprehend her surroundings. The back of the van was an empty metal box. Nothing but the benches and the single seatbelt for Pine, guarding the rear doors with his stick.

“Then people stop going to church,” Pine continued. “Decadence and concrete spread over the land. Church people start to ask themselves, what’s causing the decline in attendance? Theory I like is: modern churches had fire suppression systems. They didn’t burn down, and as a result they were never rebuilt, never right-sized to fit the new generation. After decades the buildings would be too big or too small, full of useless rooms that didn’t match the new spirit of the church. They clung to the old and resisted the renewal that nature and fire intended for all things.”

“And you’re the lightning storm, here to correct that arrogance?” Chani said. Fash were so predictable, making the same mistakes every time, like confusing buildings with real human lives.

Pine grinned wider. “Funny, isn’t it? How we get swept up in the narrative of history? Both our communities sit at a crossroads for this place. The current and future history of Our Idaho.”

Chani hated that stupid Our Idaho bullshit. She grimaced. It was sweltering in the metal van. Guess the Juniper boys objected to AC. Pine was sweating too.

“Can we get some air?” she asked.

Pine seemed to enjoy this apparent confirmation of her weakness, and so called to the driver, “Simon! Windows down.” A slight breeze began to brush through the little holes in the partition—still hot, but fresh.

“We both know the decadent generation built the world wrong,” Pine continued, “but seems to me you Greenwood folks lack the conviction to burn it down. ‘Sprawl repair’ —come on! Torch the house yourself, or risk being inside when the torches come.”

Then Chani smelled it: the Boise River, wafting in through the window. She knew it from a hundred bike rides through the greenway. They were getting close.

“You sure your wrinkled body isn’t the old house?” Chani asked, forcing her own malicious grin. “Got enough ‘young blood’ in there to be worth the carbon you exhale? When do you become ‘liability class’?”

“You’ve been talking to that traitor priest,” Pine said, grin gone, face red. “You’re the liability here. Police marched on Greenwood this afternoon, because of you. Thing is, they don’t know what they’re looking for, and I do. So when the cops are done, you and me are gonna go have a chat with my old pal Frannie.” 

This made no sense to Chani, but he was getting riled, and that’s what she needed. “Admit it, these boys will get bored of you soon,” she pressed, the scent of rushing water in her nostrils. “They’ll lock you in a nursing home right before they burn it down.” Then she called to the driver: “Won’t you, Simon?”

Pine raised his stick and thumped on the partition. This time, however, Chani was ready for him. She lunged forward and clicked open his seat belt. Then she braced herself as the van swerved. Pine flailed out of his seat, crashing to the floor. The van cut again, and Chani gripped the rear door handle. Just like last time the driver slammed on the breaks, and Pine rolled forward, stick clattering out of his hand. Chani shoved open the doors and leapt.

She stumbled, then fell onto the pavement in a rolling sprawl. They were on a bridge, almost to one side. Chani hopped the railing and flung herself down the embankment, rolling again. She found her feet in the river shallows. New evening bruises layered atop afternoon bruises, but nothing was broken.

She waded across the river and ran west. She heard shouting and the whine of the solar van reversing. She imagined Pine looking out the van, trying to figure out how to get down after her. But it was already too late: she was in the trees. The wild was adversary to both, but now it was between them. 

#

The forest scratched and snapped at her. She worried about poison ivy. Bugs flew up her nose. The day’s muggy heat had penetrated the canopy. She imagined the greenhouse firmament far above pressing closer than ever, thick with wasted breath and the ashes of dead monsters. Causing so much trouble. Or else, an excuse for trouble. She’d never know which.

Eventually she trudged out of the greenway and into the suburbs, now a patchwork of rewilding, semi-abandoned lots, sporadic well-kept lawns. Big chunks of stamped-out sprawl had been torn down. Some lots were farmed behind tall, razorwire fences. Not like home.

Federal land reapportionment had once applied eminent domain to environmentally mismanaged private lands. The asperity government used this scalpel, designed to fight wealthy landholders, as a hammer to dispossess anyone local power brokers or dox-mobs wanted out of the way. People still lived among the burnt out suburban bones—just not black or brown people like Chani, nor queer people like Chani, nor anyone else the fashions of right-wing paranoia turned against.

She heard a rumble, and she crouched in the weeds as a dozen black-booted cops passed on quad bikes and tactical scooters, headed back to Boise in a tight line. A show of force, no doubt returning from Greenwood. She wondered if seeing them now was good or bad.

She walked on, to a familiar hill, hiked up. Propaganda signs had been set up on the top, pointedly facing Greenwood: “Pure Soil, Pure Sky, Pure Idaho” and “Resist the Great Replacement.” Rust marked the boundary between sprawlrot and retrosurbubia; the storm had whipped flecks of red metal off the billboard struts, dotting brownfields on one side, fruit bushes and rows of leafy greens on the other.

Just like that, she was home. She marveled at how little she felt at this fact. The streets were empty—not surprising, given the police had recently passed. She trudged down the boardwalk, mechanically picked a plum from a roadside damson tree. Had she eaten anything all day?

The lab was under a repaired big box store that now served as an artisan commons. When she got there Chani found commotion. The place looked trashed: windows shot out, tools and goods strewn outside the entrance. Inside, Frannie’s technicians were performing first aid on half a dozen cop-beaten artisans. Chani walked up to Frannie who was debating with her assistant whether a solar panel, flung from the roof, could be salvaged.

“‘Sun’s not free,’ one of them actually told me. Can you believe those pigs?” Frannie said. Then, seeing Chani, “Holy shit.”

Chani burst into tears then, and old, hefty Frannie took her in a bear hug. She sobbed, understanding nothing but the petting of her hair. Some minutes later someone passed her a burrito. Chani sat in the grass and ate. New contacts were found and Chani’s vision gushed with frantic messages backed up over the day. Then they hustled down to the DIY lab, concealed in a bunker the big box had built for management to hide out during labor unrest. In the white noise privacy of humming centrifuges and grow lights, improvised chemistry sets and pill-packing rigs, Chani spilled her story in one long, tangled sentence.

“Ja-red-fuck-ing-Pine,” Frannie spat. “You know I once had to debate that asshole, when I ran for governor. Back when we were trying to be civil.” She laughed.

“He called you ‘old pal,’ Fran,” Chani said. “Got the feeling this is some kind of grudge for him. And I was what? A bargaining piece?”

“The year I got the dem-soc nomination, Pine tried to run on his side too. Thought his selfie stick was the only campaign he needed. I didn’t win, but I made damn sure he didn’t either. We heckled each other online for years after, until things went to shit.” Frannie sighed. “The Juniper Boys are mean as hell, but they aren’t an army. And Pine, he’s the kind of dumb the establishment likes to keep around, which means the cops do most of his dirty work. They didn’t find shit though, this time, so I expect Pine will be along soon. Suppose we better go talk to him.”

“Talk to him?” Chani was livid. “He kidnapped me! I’d rather, I dunno...eliminate him!”

“You think we can just shoot a minor fash religious celeb dead in the street?” Frannie pointed at the ceiling. “Cop balloons are watching our every move today. That means we can’t make much noise, and we definitely can’t make bodies. The state still finds deaths it didn’t approve bureaucratically inconvenient.”

Chani waved around the lab. “We also can’t keep this going with Pine trying to jump every delivery we send out. So, what, we’re supposed to pay him off? Befriend him? Fuck that!”

Frannie said nothing. Instead she just hobbled towards the stairs, not looking back. Chani followed.

#

A straggle of Greenwood folks gathered atop the hill at the edge of the neighborhood. The low sun still burned, but Chani felt a cooler, ozone-tweaked wind whip up from the river. After everything, was another storm coming?

Lights on the road below. Three vans pulled up. White men in identical haircuts poured out. They brandished torches and gas cans. Chani wondered what corrupt dispensation let the Juniper Boys waste restricted carbon fuels on arson.

Pine got out and hoofed it up the hill. He had his stick but was working hard not to use it.

“Frannie-fran!” Pine called. “When I heard someone was bootlegging slut pills, I just knew! Been enjoying playing doctor with your little nurse there?”

“What do you want, Jared?” Frannie called back. They stood only paces apart, but each was putting on a show for the two crowds.

“You know, it’s a real shame you dropped off the feeds,” Pine said. “I used to enjoy your little commie rants. Bet you never imagined we’d end up here. You a fake pharmacist and me,” he raised his staff like Moses, “a prophet.”

“Yeah, your fanboys down there are real divine-sent mascots of asperity. Those fine, fibershed shirts, fronting like they want to raze our fields,” Frannie said. “Thing is, lot of people in Greenwood already got fucked over by the cops today. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were spoiling for a fairer fight.” The crowd of artisans and lab techs murmured agreement. “So what, exactly, do you want?”

“Let’s just say we’re looking to diversify our activities.” Pine grinned. “And seems like you might be needing a new distributor.”

Chani’s blood boiled. The sectarian violence, the incoherent eco-ideology—none of it had meant anything. Everything was still about money.

“Why would you want to work with me, Jared?” Frannie said. “You know I fucking hate you.”

“I got growing boys to feed,” Pine said, his voice not as loud. He was serious, Chani realized. The priest had been right: Pine’s position was precarious. “Plus, I like the idea of spoiling your perfect lefty commune here. You probably think Greenwood is that paradise-built-in-hell nonsense. But at best it’s just another temporary autonomous zone, emphasis on the temporary. And when it falls apart, I want to be there to drop a match on the tinder you leave behind.”

“There you go again, pretending to believe in something other than your own ego,” Frannie said. Then she walked up to Pine and punched him in the nose.

There was a collective gasp as Pine went down. No one had ever seen the old woman move that fast. The Greenwood crowd shifted forward a step. Down the hill torches flared and wavered.

“Just like the good old days,” Frannie said, rubbing her hand. She leaned over Pine. “Listen, you know why we call it ‘Greenwood’? Because green wood is hard to fucking burn. No, don’t get up. I get it. Your coin is slipping from favor, and those party member condos don’t come cheap. Well, tell you what. We can help each other after all. You deliver my meds, and I’ll be generous with your cut. But I decide what we sell and to whom, and your boys report to Chani there. And when they come up here, they’re going to do permaculture work, too. Put their hands in the dirt and learn how to grow something better than fash forest. If you’re lucky, we’ll gracefully dismantle your gang before they kill you, me, and everyone else with a spot of grey. But, last catch, you gotta shake my hand first, from right down there in the dirt.”

Pine’s eyes swelled with hate but, also, calculation. He shook.

#

The sun went down. The propaganda billboards blurred into the twilight. Pine limped away, leaning on his stick, hand covering his bleeding nose. The Juniper boys folded themselves back inside their vans and left.

“The hell was that?” Chani asked, as the whole group followed Frannie back down the hill.

“I dunno, some prison yard bullshit I decided to try,” Frannie said. “Predators don’t do well when you get off their script. Also I promoted you. Hope that’s okay.”

“Sure, put a queer, brown girl in charge of a violent, fascist gang. What could go wrong?”

“Yes, we’re dealing with the devil,” Frannie said, “but the devil is looking for a career change. Stagnant ideology always gives way to crime and grift. Let Pine’s gang become an actual gang-gang. Planting trees and selling drugs is better than planting trees and burning down churches. That’s something we can manage.”

“We’re ‘managing’ fash now?” Chani boiled, even amidst the weird triumph over Pine.

Frannie stopped, took Chani by the shoulders. “Our enemies are in city hall. Our enemies are in the capitol, and the White House, and all in between. The state can always crush us. We only stay safe by keeping them not quite motivated to do so. And that means having allies, and footholds, and a little bit of power. We bought time today, and that’s always what we need.”

Since she’d come upon that blacked church, Chani had been flung from frying pan to frying pan. She wanted desperately to be done, but instead it just kept lurching along. A tower in a storm, burning down over and over.

“Fran, what are we doing? Greenwood is one thing, but this world — how are we supposed to live here?”

Frannie started moving again. “Witness, comprehend, inhabit.”

“Put that on one of those billboards,” Chani said, a last spat of sarcasm. Frannie ignored her, just kept walking.

Chani wasn’t sure she understood the old woman yet. Another day, she would try. She slumped against Frannie and walked home. Clouds moved in and opened. This rain was just a drizzle. It washed off the sweat of the long day.

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

Sometimes you’ve got to be patient.

That’s a lesson, perhaps, of my new short story, “The Weather Out There,” published in Long Now Ideas, a publication of the Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to encourage long-term thinking. I’m a long-time Long Now member, from back when I was attending their in-person events in San Francisco most every month, and so it’s exciting to get to speak to their audience and contribute to their larger intellectual project. (Long Now also reprinted my story “The Mammoth Steps” back and interviewed me about my book in 02022.)

Patience is also possibly the lesson of the long journey this story had to finding a home. I first drafted this story seven(!!) years ago. That’s a long time to hold a candle for a story, but I really liked it, and so I never quite buried it in the trunk. In the years since it’s been through many revisions and rewrites, ballooning up to 10k words and back down to 3k. Eventually I pitched it to Long Now, and they took it right away. Of course an organization focused on long-term thinking would be the right place to publish this story about conversations that play out over centuries, messages traveling for decades through the murk of deep space.

This story is set is the Bay Area over a thousand years from now. For a good chunk of that future time, people have been in communication with an alien civilization, the Alsafi, some 19 light-years away. There is no ansible in this story, no faster-than-light travel, no way around the cosmic speed limit. If you had a question for the aliens, you’d have to wait about 40 years for an answer. It’s a slow conversation, but one that makes humans appreciate their environmental sustainability and organizational/cultural continuity. Until, one day, the Alsafi go silent.

The story follows Ferris, who works on the teams that send messages across the void, recording his thoughts in a journal that comes with his ancient Oakland house. As he tries to puzzle out what happened to the Alsafi, he rekindles a relationship with an old flame, Cassio, and, well, things get complicated.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Say there’s a lighthouse out there.” Cassio waved towards Marin. “It’s going to blink a message at you. What are all the things that have to go right for you to get that message?”

“You have to have line of sight,” I said. “And be looking in the right direction, at the right time. You have to be watching long enough to see the whole message, and you need a good enough memory to remember the pattern. Then you have to know how to decode it.”

“And,” Cass waved expansively, “it can’t be too foggy.”

“We’re pretty good at predicting the weather out there, you know.”

“I’ve never liked that metaphor. Tracking matter a dozen light-years away is nothing like watching for clouds on the horizon. It’s dark, and your model has to look decades ahead based on the thinnest flickers of shadow. Did you know they keep changing the estimates of how much dark matter there is in the universe?”

I did, but something about being there with her, on that beach, stirred a thought I hadn’t had before.

“In the histories the Alsafi used to wonder a lot why they never heard from anyone besides us,” I said. “They’ve always been more bullish about the chances of life in the universe.”

“You think if they got a transmission from someone else, they’d stop talking to us?” Cassio asked.

“A second contact changes everything about The Conversation. Do they tell us about them, or them about us? Whose permission do they need first? Who do they prioritize? It gets complicated.”

“Kind of like us,” Cass said.

She spoke low, barely louder than the surf. We let it hang there for a moment, the chimes of distant drift-ships rolling in and out of the Golden Gate. 

“Kind of like us,” I agreed.

Long Now published this alongside reprinting an essay from this very newsletter, “Space is Dead. Why Do We Keep Writing About It?” (We slightly expanded and adjusted this piece, so check out the updated version on the Long Now site.)

This essay proposes that the huge amount of sci-fi written about spaceships, colonies on faraway planets, galactic empires, and daring astronauts might be out of sync with the sluggish or nonexistent progress we’ve made over the last 50 years toward such a spacefaring future. It finishes with a coda that we want to find out what’s out there in the universe and talk to aliens, we first need to figure out how to survive here on Earth. Perhaps we need to extend human life not out into space, but into time.

This is really the core idea behind “The Weather Out There” too. Its vision of futurity is subversively not that futuristic. It’s a thousand years in the future, and yet no one is uploaded into the singularity. There are no androids, or cyborgs, or genemods — at least not that show up in the story. They have various “equipment” floating in the outer solar system, but no mention is made of space colonies or humans traveling to or living on other planets.

Instead, some institutions seem different: money is not mentioned, and housing isn’t privately owned, and a different calendar is in use with different holidays. But places like Oakland and Berkeley bear the same names they have today (though no one mentions “America” or other nation states). It’s a future in which life is, for the most part, familiar. People are still living in houses and gardening in back yards, still commuting on public transit or by bike, still taking moody walks on the chilly beach.

My goal was to point toward a future that had stabilized. That was modern and sophisticated, but was no longer roiling with technological and social upheaval. I think we have a hard time envisioning such a possibility. We tend to think that, by the time we get to the “far” future, we’ll have either blown ourselves back to the stone age (or some other pre-modern state) or our technology will have rendered human life totally unrecognizable.

Is that what we want, though? Singularity and apocalypse certainly have their constituencies, but I’m doubtful of their broad appeal. What does a majoritarian future look like?

Well, if I had to guess, I think most people are grateful to be living with modern medicine and many modern conveniences, but are also somewhat skeptical of technology. (The college freshman I teach are very anti-tech this year.) Most people want their kids to benefit from progress, but don’t want them to entirely depart from family traditions. Most people don’t want to be beholden to the past, but also don’t want to be forgotten, buried by the rubble of history.

This is not a particularly sophisticated ideology, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable — though it’s got edge cases that get tricky, spots where the project of emancipation is deeply lagging and such a moderating impulse turns reactionary and hateful. Let (cis-hetero)patriarchy fall, and white supremacy be washed away, and animals be liberated, and capitalism be surpassed. And of course big changes must be wrought to the world to survive and roll back climate disaster. There are just upheavals that we should embrace and demand.

But on the other side of those, what are we going to do for the thousands of years yet to come? What if it never becomes practical or comfortable to spread throughout the stars, or transfer our consciousness into computer code, or time travel, or all the other magic sci-fi likes to imagine? What if we are just here, on Earth, with each other?

Must empires always be rising and falling, or might we achieve some kind of equilibrium? A rough shape of the world that can be preserved and maintained and passed down generation to generation without much objection. Institutions of continuity that keep the past from turning into a foreign country and allow the future to feel tangible and accessible.

Would we want that? Or would it be stifling? Would we find satisfaction in cathedral-time projects, or interstellar conversations? Or does life in modernity require a certain amount of churn to be meaningful? I don’t have answers, but I think these are good questions.

Maybe I’m thinking about all this because, this week anyway, the near future feels impossibly hard to imagine. The election holds us in a state of quivering quantum uncertainty, and either outcome could come with near-term violence by reactionaries and fascists. I realized today that Trump has been a constant presence and topic of conversation for more than a quarter of my life. For my students, it’s half their lives; they’re voting now, and Trump has been running for president since they were nine. As a person and a movement, he’s deeply, deeply oppressive to the imagination. He saps our attention and curdles our discourse and makes every discussion about the future begin and end with "Trump or not Trump.” Here’s hoping he loses, and we can finally start having a real conversation.

Read “The Weather Out There” in Long Now Ideas, and let me know what you think.

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News + Reviews + Miscellany

• Martin Hähnel had a nice comment on the aforementioned “Space is Dead” essay: “We can still dream of space. But we ought to do it not turning away from what we need to go through - system change - before we go beyond.”

• Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by the great Francesco Verso and published by Flame Tree Press as part of their Beyond & Within series, is now out! It includes fiction by me, as well as Ken Liu, Sarena Ulabarri, Renan Bernando, and others. It’s a beautiful-looking and -reading volume, so get your copy here.

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Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• Damage Magazine released their third issue, “Mothers,” featuring writing from a bunch of interesting people I know and like. Check it out!

• D.A. Xiaolin Spires has a fresh story out in the latest issue of Clarkesworld titled “Luminous Glass, Vibrant Seeds.” I had the pleasure of workshopping this story with her last spring during my Clarion West class on how to write solarpunk and climate fiction, so it’s awesome to see it find a home in such a great venue. (She’s also got an essay in this issue about zero-g fight scenes.)

• CY Ballard’s Cosmic Mystery Club dug into the unreliable explainer character in this essay on The Empty Man. You should subscribe!

• M. M. Olivas’ novel Sundown in San Ojuela comes out in a couple weeks. Give it a preorder!

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Art Tour: The Active Voice

Still thinking about this sublime rock I saw at the St. Louis Art Museum a few months ago.

If you liked this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

Before we get into this edition, I wanted to share some news. My next novel has been picked up by Soho Press, which I am so very stoked about. Tentatively titled Absence, it’s a cosmic mystery about trying to make the world make sense in the face of unprecedented times. It’s a fast-paced supernatural thriller, and I can’t wait for you all to get to read it. Here’s the obligatory Publishers Marketplace announcement:

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Climate Survival Means Preparing Everywhere

An increasingly common experience in our contemporary world, in which our bonds of kinship and friendship are often networked and spread out, is hearing and reading about areas impacted by climate chaos and feeling an itch of familiarity, a sense that, don’t you know someone who lives around there? Turns out I do have friends and family in the Asheville/Hendersonville area of North Carolina, which were` badly hit by Hurricane Helene. Everyone is okay, thankfully, but last weekend was an anxious few days of spotty contact, punctuated by pictures of tree-struck houses trickling through my family’s text network.

In my book Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, I tried to coin a term: neverstorm. A neverstorm is an unprecedented — and yet, thanks to climate change, increasingly common and likely — heavy weather event that hits a locale not used to that particular valence of climate mayhem. It’s a disaster beyond a hundred-year-storm or hundred-year-flood. A disaster that has never happened before in recorded memory. These events are so destructive not just because of their severity (though they are severe), but because they catch communities and institutions and infrastructure flat footed.

My book imagines a particular, fictional example of a neverstorm: a hurricane charging up the Rio de la Plata to hit Buenos Aires in the middle of hosting COP40 — with varying results, depending on which scenario one is in. But the years since I first wrote the word in 2019 have given us plenty of real life examples. The megafires that caused Orange Sky Day in California in 2020, and that choked the air over half the continent in 2023, for instance. Or the polar vortex freeze that knocked out the Texas power grid in 2021. Or the heat waves that disrupt life in northern cities like Portland or Vancouver. Or, most recently, Hurricane Helene, a storm hundreds of miles across, which came up the western side of Florida and carved a swath through the south that was visible from space. Helene brought massive flooding to North Carolina communities that had never considered themselves hurricane risk zones, because they are hundreds of miles from the coast.

In the novel, neverstorms feature most prominently in the second section, a capitalist-surrealist future in which redevelopment after heavy weather is big business and emissions mitigation has gone out the window. The story features a pair of hustlers who try to win some funding by claiming their software platform predicts neverstorms — right before a real neverstorm hits. They’re offering (falsely) the last piece of the puzzle for a world that’s decided everything can be financialized away if you have the right risk analysis and don’t care much about the human costs.

This past week wrote an interesting post titled ‘Bad Climate Socialism’ about how, on the spectrum between state-planned managed retreat from hurricane-prone areas and letting the free market accurately price insurance for those areas to force people to leave, we are choosing a dangerous middle ground.

Due to the nature of our political system, which rewards cowardice and punishes anyone who might dare to tell coastal homeowners that they are fucked, we are going to get a blend of the worst aspects of both options. Politicians will demand federal bailouts of the costs associated with each disaster, and they will introduce various regulations and financial schemes to artificially hold down the price of insurance—well below its true price, meaning a price that would allow insurance companies to fully pay for all of the costs that climate change will impose. These costs will continually increase. Eventually, the costs to the nation of subsidizing the ability of people to live in unwise locations will be so enormous that all the rest of the citizens will revolt. “Save our homes!” one side will cry. “Why should I pay for you to live at the beach?” everyone else will cry. A vicious political war will ensue.

I don’t entirely disagree with this analysis, but I do want to take issue with some of the framing. Because if we were to enact a “managed retreat” from the high risk coasts, communities like Hendersonville and Asheville, two hundred miles from the beach, are exactly the areas that we would have people retreat to. In fact, Asheville was once touted as a “climate haven” that people moved to specifically to avoid climate risk. Now, thanks to Helene’s neverstorm-style flooding and wind, these towns are decimated and hundreds are dead. As many op-eds this past week have pointed out, nowhere is safe.

Yes, some coastal areas are certainly more at risk, and it’s counterproductive to rebuild there over and over again. Maybe we can phase those areas into a huge national park, so that people can enjoy the beach when the weather is light and no homes and livelihoods are lost when the weather is heavy. That’s a kind of managed retreat I can see working. It gets trickier when we consider how vital our ports are to getting anything done in this globalized world — as the brief dockworker strike this past week hammered home.

But let’s not kid ourselves that the country can be neatly divided into “states who need bailouts” and “states who don’t,” as Hamilton suggests. The nature of climate chaos is that hurricanes and other superstorms will be more frequent, more powerful, and more unpredictable. Every so-called low-risk ‘climate haven’ is just one bad roll of the atmospheric dice from being under water, or on fire, or covered in ice.

I think this report from the Climate & Community Institute strikes a good balance. It suggests creating state agencies that would provide public disaster insurance alongside risk reduction efforts, that would bring democratic control to this arena, instead of letting the market privatize the profits while we socialize the losses.

I just don’t see a future in which everyone moves into impervious climate fortresses. Until we repair the damage we’ve done to the climate, we’re going to have to accept that we live in the age of neverstorms. And we’re going to have to start thinking differently about what it means to “foot the bill” when homes and businesses and whole towns are washed away.

Let’s add ‘neverstorm’ to our climate lexicon. It reminds us that all communities need to be prepared for heavy weather; that we have to invest in robust infrastructure and diverse disaster response capacity everywhere; that no matter how far we retreat, there will still be a need for bailouts; and that we should cultivate compassion and solidarity, instead of miserliness and resentment, because what happens to places deemed “unwise” can happen to us, too.

News, Reviews + Miscellany

• Charles Payseur had nice things to say in Locus about my story "The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy,” which came out earlier this year in Escape Pod:

  Hudson blends an undeniable energy and culture-focused voice that makes even the grittier elements seem fun rather than harrowing. And it further expands the world of Rocky Cornelius and her unique way of moving through the world, trailing de­struction and surprisingly satisfied customers.

• PGR at Woldbuilding.Agency riffed on my “America After the Gas Station” post from last month:

  So perhaps now I have a good answer for the people who (not unreasonably) ask me how I'll recognise mature solarpunk fiction when I see it: mature solarpunk fiction will have internalised the charging station as an image and as a location in the same way that C20th cinema internalised the gas station.

• This past month I had the pleasure of giving a talk for the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative. This is a great event series, supported by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and helmed by my friend and teacher . I presented alongside my fellow Sci-Fi Economics Lab resident Joffa Applegate, an ASU complexity economist. The topic was “Sci-Fi Economics: Using Speculative Fiction to Imagine Alternative Futures.” Joffa talked about how designing our economies is a kind of imaginative worldbuilding, and I went the other direction and talked about why worldbuilders (the creative kind) should think about economics, and some strategies for doing so. It was a great conversation. You can watch the video of it here.

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Recommendations + Fellow Travellers

• I can’t recommend enough these stories by Lee Derouen about futuristic third spaces, published by my friends at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. They’re my favorite kind of science fiction — in which the imaginative new technologies on display enable larger conversations about where we are going as a culture and a planet.

• If you haven’t been following my partner CY Ballard’s Cosmic Mystery Club newsletter, this past month’s edition featured the fantastic video game Pentiment and breaks down the “Palimpsest vs. Lacuna” framework we’ve been batting about together for some time. Check it out!

• My good friends Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray have a book coming out later this year from Columbia University Press that I’m very excited for: Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in America. If, like me, you’ve been waiting for someone to connect the dots between the Boy Scouts and Silicon Valley Mars fantasies, give this one a preorder.

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”

We’d been talking about getting an EV for a while — there’s zero non-financial justification for buying a fossil vehicle in 2024. I’m a relatively high information consumer when it comes to the energy transition, but still the process of switching from gas to electric took some adjustment.

Perhaps ambitiously, we tried to catch up with our Colorado itinerary, figuring we might as well just jump into the deep end of the pool. We did our first fast charge at a Gallup Walmart Supercenter, stopping for lunch at the McDonalds inside. There we discovered, after several frustrating attempts, that successfully connecting to an Electrify America fast charger required manually holding the too-heavy charger flush to our car until it fully paired and began charging. (Thank you Reddit for this secret trick.) Thankfully, we also discovered that you meet the absolute nicest, most helpful people at the charger. Probably this is because, well, frankly, people who buy EVs are more likely to be conscientious liberals who take pride in such niceness. But also there’s a sense of tribal mutual benefit: the more easily new EV drivers can get through this learning curve, the more of us there will be, and the more charging infrastructure will be built in response.

We did our next top-up in the back lot of a Buick dealership in Farmington, hanging out in their air conditioned lounge. It was at this point that we decided we weren’t going to catch up with our whole Colorado itinerary. Mostly this was because we were two days behind, and 12 hour driving days seemed a lot less fun than 5 hour ones. But I must admit that range anxiety played a part, as did the general friction the new car added to the trip. Our dashboard reported on our second-by-second efficiency, so we drove slower to maximize the mileage of our charge. And since we had opted for a used 2019 model instead of a more expensive new one, we were unable to get the ultrafast/hyperfast charge speeds that make it possible to fill up with a 15 minutes bathroom break, instead of a 45 minute lunch. Our trip had been planned for a gas car, and that was no longer what we were driving.

It all worked out fine, of course: we chilled in New Mexico for a couple days, then returned to Flagstaff to camp there. We had a tricky moment arriving in Flag at the very end of our charge, with the car switching to low-thrust mode for the last few hundred meters — a lesson learned about what those estimated mileage numbers really mean. In the end we capped off our trip with a final charge at Posse Grounds Park in Sedona: a sleek newish facility with a tremendous view of the surrounding mountains and buttes. We sat in the shade, near where dancers stretched on the performance stage, and we passed the time sipping cider while we gazed out at Sedona’s legendary red rocks.

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be able to charge your car in places like Posse Grounds, instead of filling up your tank at dingy, petrol-fumed gas stations. Charge stations aren’t all going to be that nice, of course; a Walmart parking lot is spiritually very similar to a gas station. But I think we have an opportunity to beautify the way we experience the most American of American institutions — the interstate highway system.

More than Congress, or the Post Office, or the military, it’s our roads that cohered modern America into a continent-sized society. We could have done it with rail, and maybe we will in the future, but for the last century it’s been all about highways.

Those highways are made drivable by a vast infrastructural and logistical network. We don’t think much about it, because it’s so ubiquitous and banal, but now that I’m working with a different network (the public charging network), I’ve started to notice all that infrastructure in a new way. The scale of it boggles.

After all, gas cars can’t drive forever any more than EVs can. They have to stop every few hundred miles to refuel. And unlike electricity, which can travel by wire or be generated in place, to feed our internal combustion engines we must truck explosive, toxic gasoline out to every town, and often to uninhabited locations in the middle of nowhere.

It’s staggering to contemplate how much stuff was built to ensure that no fossil motorist in America need ever experience what EV owners call “range anxiety.” Beyond filling up before heading out on a long trip, Americans rarely have to plan out ahead of time where they’ll refuel or worry from the outset about whether their car will have the range to make it to their destination.

Once I went on a camping trip from the Bay to California’s Lost Coast. It was a longer drive than I’d thought, but I kept thinking I was getting close. Before I knew it, I was deep in the redwoods, on a twisty little road snaking me toward the coast, and I was running out of gas. It was too late to turn around, find something back on the 101. I began to contemplate the embarrassment of running dry, having to call for a tow or — because I didn’t have signal — hike to get help…somewhere. Then, around the last possible bend, after having not seen another car or building for miles and miles, I found a gas station. America had saved me from my own mistakes.

I fully expect that in the not so distant future, us EV drivers will have the same swaddling blanket of infrastructure enabling our interstate transit and commerce. Batteries will be better, carrying us further and charging faster. Chargers will be everywhere — probably even more so than gas stations, since they don’t require attendants and have a much lighter footprint, requiring only grid connection, rather than enormous underground tanks for storing petrol, double lined to reduce leakage into the groundwater. Maybe some won’t even need the grid, instead being big batteries fed by a bank of solar panels soaking up some remote patch of sun.

This EV infrastructure buildout comes with plenty of questions and challenges, of course. Fast chargers require high voltage, and can put strain on grids. Chargers frequently stop working, have software issues, often require more maintenance than is currently budgeted for them. The minerals needed for batteries and EV components will likely have a significant extractive footprint — though one still dwarfed by the extractive footprint of our existing fossil fuel industry. In the grand scheme these seem to me small, fiddly details compared to the scope of investment and sociotechnical decision-making our empire of gas stations required. Let us not get tricked by “petrochauvinism,” to adapt my previous coinage, into ignoring the costs of that fossil fuel system — in money, manpower, material, and environmental damage.

Hopefully, one day a little further on into that not so distant future, fossil cars will fully phase out, and the gas station will be obsolete. Some will probably stay on as electrified travel and truck stops — drivers will still need toilets and snacks, after all. But many will surely need to be dismantled, the surrounding soil remediated. It will be a big, messy job, but perhaps not as messy as forcing countless Americans to live and work near gas stations, exposed to toluene and benzene fumes.

And on the other side, what will America be like after the gas station? Healthier certainly, with cleaner air and water and soil. Perhaps also less ugly, as the interstices between our towns/cities and the open road become less dominated by the same gas station architecture, the same signage war between the same oil majors. You’ve probably seen this famous picture of “Gas Vegas”:

There’s something about gas stations that drag everything down around them. You can see it in the property values. Some of the drag is just due to the traffic, the coming and going of all those vehicles and people, which can’t much be helped. But airports are full of traveling people too, and yet the facilities in airports run the gamut from downmarket to up, from grungy to luxe. No, there is something unique about the chemical, contaminating nature of gas stations, which puts them closer to their fossil brethren — peaker plants and refineries — which we tend to shove into low income communities. Few high end establishments want to set up shop next to a gas station, subjecting their staff and clientele to the attendant fumes and constant engine noise. And so we get these knots of franchise-filled sameness that define automobile travel and, for many, America.

But EV chargers are totally different. You can put them at a movie theater or a salon, in a park or at a scenic lookout. There’s a hum, but not much else. The culture and aesthetics of highway charging stations has the potential to be less like gas stations and more like rest stops: a combination of the necessary (bathrooms, vending machines) and the quirky (WPA murals, dog runs, informational pamphlets, nature signage, exercise equipment, architectural expressiveness).

And the mechanics of charging give a little more time to explore and appreciate these elements. I suspect what Electrify America calls “hyper-fast” charging (350 KW) will eventually be the norm on road trips, getting most charged up and on their way in about half an hour. Even if that gets faster and the time comes down more, I doubt we’ll ever get the two minute transactions we’re used to at the jump. Instead we’ll plug in and take a little time to stretch, eat, and enjoy the scenery. And so it will matter more what that scenery is and what amenities are on offer.

Back home after our road trip, we are learning early how to live without the gas station. We don’t have a garage, and our complex doesn’t have chargers yet, so regaining the miles we lose on errands and C’s commute has become a regular part of our week. There are a few L2 slow chargers we’ve started to frequent. C charges at work, when a charger is free. Or we go to the library and hang out for a few hours, doing our writing there instead of staying home, which has turned out to be good for our productivity, and our sense of community. Occasionally I’ll run the car over to the Chargepoint a few blocks away, behind a printshop on the other side of our local park, then trot home through the grafittied alleys. Once it cools off, I expect this will be a nice excuse to squeeze in a couple extra walks into my week.

All this takes a bit more time and attention than a gas station fill up, but nothing too onerous so far, and the cost per mile is far cheaper than gas. In come cases it’s even free. And of course, for EV owners with garages, such runaround is generally unnecessary, since they can simply trickle charge overnight to regain their range.

As much as I’m glad to be free of the gas station (while still envying their present ubiquity), I don’t think they were exactly a mistake. Allowing the car to replace rail and other mass transit might have been a mistake, but once that choice had been made the gas station was a crucial part of giving the masses of Americans access to travel and mobility, which I think is one of the great and astonishing benefits of modernity.

But those benefits came with terrible costs to our climate, environment, and health. With the energy transition, we have a chance to build a new system that alleviates some of those costs, and also comes with new benefits.

America after the gas station will need to refigure some of the national coherence that, for better or worse, our gas station culture provided. There is something powerful about being able to walk into a place you’ve never been to before and know what to expect: how much you’ll pay, how to work the pumps, what snacks to look for, what qualifies as a clean enough bathroom. The monotony of the market can be a relief, especially when far from home. Some of that consistency should be saved, and some discarded.

Maybe our new road culture will be a culture of friendly chats at the charger, sharing pleasantries and weatherchat. Maybe it will be about ten thousand roadside attractions tugging you to enjoy this oddity or that vista while you volt up. Maybe it will be a culture that blooms not on highways but in trains, favorite dishes in the cafe car, poems jotted while gazing out the window. Maybe something else.

Whatever it is, I think putting fast chargers in places like Posse Grounds is a good first step. Beautiful, calm, activity-filled places. A couple weeks ago, we took another camping trip up near Flagstaff, and naturally we stopped at Posse Grounds for our reup. This time we brought lunch and got our charge while watching skateboarders roll around the pristine ramps, old guys shoot hoops on the basketball court. It felt like the start of a new tradition, the second time of many.

GoFundMe for LP Kindred

One of my Clarion classmates and a wonderful member of the SFF community needs some help. LP Kindred is a talented and immensely generous Black, queer, working class writer. He recently moved to Chicago to go back to school, but unfortunately arrangements fell apart. Now he’s experiencing some housing insecurity and is struggling to get back on his feet. If you’re able, please consider donating to this GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b50004b6.

Northern Lights: Four Energy Futures of the North

As you may recall, I spent much of 2023 in Sweden working at Luleå University of Technology on an energy futures project. A year later, the major output of that effort is now a beautiful printed book titled Northern Lights: Four Energy Futures of the North.

The book contains four short stories I wrote imagining complex and nuanced energy futures in Northern Sweden. It also contains much commentary and methodological explanation about our narrative hack-a-thons and futuring approach, as well as several awesome illustrations. A very interesting package on the whole!

My copies are still in transit, but Anna has gotten her hands on the printed version, seen above. If you’d like to read the book, you can access the ebook for free at this link.

And if you happen to be in the time zones that are awake at 12pm CEST, you might want to sign up for this Sept. 17 Ripple session at The Drop climate conference, in which my colleagues will use the book to talk about putting humanity at the center of climate transition discussions.

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Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

This month I have some post-summer reading recs, including new releases from a few authors I admire:

• Paolo Bacigalupi has a new book out, Navola, a twisty secondary world fantasy inspired by the Italian Renaissance and the Medici bankers. I first heard about this novel way back in 2020 when Paolo and I both worked on the Cities of Light project. So it was a delight to finally get to read it. We listened to the audiobook on our much-troubled summer camping trip, and the fantasy-Italian slang wormed its way delightfully into our brains. If you like your fantasy light on magic and heavy on politics, you’ll probably enjoy Navola.

• Madeline Ashby also has a book out this past month, Glass Houses. This one is still in my TBR pile, but from what Madeline has told me about it, I’m expecting it to be a humdinger.

• Early in the summer I really enjoyed Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. As a big fan of both alternate history and detective procedurals, I’m pretty much the exact target audience for this. Even so, it really is excellent. What if colonial genocide of Native Americans had been held off, and white America had had to share the continent with indigenous nations and cultures?

• Meanwhile, I have been reading The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. I’m a big Miéville fan, so I had to check this celebrity collab out. It’s related to Keanu’s BRZRKR graphic novel, which I wasn’t previously familiar with, but am now dying to get my hands on.

• Finally, with Jaymo’s urging, I read Conclave by Robert Harris, the novel upon which they’ve based an upcoming movie. It was good! Exactly what it says on the tin: a detailed, page-turning thriller about the election of a new pope.

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Art Tour: Be Not Afraid

Some very cool local art, tucked away in the back lot behind a bar/pinball arcade.

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”