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Five interlocking novelettes explore the possibilities of our climate future.

What is the future of climate politics? Given that our summers now regularly feature Arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and “100-year” storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Inspired by the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five.

The setting is the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them—and the world—in each alternate universe. The diverging paths also show these characters as different people living different lives, shaped by whether investments in climate adaptation and mitigation demanded today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize and repair the planet.

Written by speculative-fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson, Our Shared Storm‘s five overlapping novelettes employ a futurist technique called “scenarios thinking.” Rather than try to predict how history will unfold—picking one out of many unpredictable and contingent branching paths—it instead creates a set of futures that represent major trends or counterposed possibilities. In this way Our Shared Storm offers a cogent critique of our present day climate politics: from the structure of the UN framework treaty to the social culture at the COP.

Though the bulk of this work is fiction, Our Shared Storm includes a non-fiction introduction and an afterword examining the climate fiction as a genre what role narratives can play in shaping our climate politics. In this way it can serve as a useful text for teaching about this emerging body of literature.

ISBN-13 9780823299546

Published: 2022-04-05

Fordham University Press

Reviews

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

— Kim Stanley Robinson

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

— Publishers Weekly

Hudson’s innovative and exciting publication is, simultaneously, a consideration of the relationship between climate fiction and climate policy, a highly readable and teachable set of climate stories, and a critical intervention in what climate fiction is capable of achieving in the ‘real’ world.

— Adeline Johns-Putra, Professor of Literature, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

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

— Christopher Schaberg, author of Searching for the Anthropocene

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

— H-Net Reviews