Our Shared Futures

Can climate fiction help us see our way through the maze of possible futures we face? Can it help us move forward from our present moment? Andrew Dana Hudson’s slim novel, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, engages these questions directly, by imagining how four characters’ lives would change in different climate scenarios.

I kept thinking about this book as COP27 unfolded in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, ending with a promise of progress mixed with larger failures. (COP is short for Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

The good news: a historic agreement to work on a structure  for “loss and damage,” offering aid to the countries most affected by climate change—countries that did the least to cause it, and are least equipped to combat it. On the other hand, the failure, yet again, to set firm commitments among countries for a path to decarbonization that could hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.

Hudson, a futurist and fiction writer, based Our Shared Storm on five scenarios developed by climate scholars and used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They describe broad pathways the world might take over the next decades, leading to differing levels of climate change, with related effects on politics, economic inequality, and more:

• Scenario 1, “taking the green road,” with the world shifting to sustainable and equitable ways of living
• Scenario 2, “middle of the road,” with a mix of initiatives and challenges
• Scenario 3, the “rocky road,” where a failure to take significant action leads to rising nationalism and war
• Scenario 4, “a road divided,” with poorer areas suffering more than nations that can use their resources to adapt
• Scenario 5, “taking the highway,” where fossil-fuel use continues to power out-of-control corporate development, favoring giant geoengineering solutions over local ones

This might seem like a too-tidy formula for generating a novel. But Hudson brings these probable futures to life through four main characters who cross paths at a future COP, held in Buenos Aires in the year 2054. In each story, a huge hurricane looms—they call it a “neverstorm”—and then crashes over the city. The characters come from all over: Noah from the US, Luis from Argentina, Diya from India, and Saga from Sweden. Their experiences are different each time, in ways that mirror the five scenarios.

But it’s more than that: each person comes to the COP already changed as a result of the different paths they followed over the decades leading up to it. These changes deliver us straight into the different worlds they inhabit, maybe more than any larger events could.

Luis, for instance, appears variously as a taxi driver, an aspiring entrepreneur, and a guerrilla leader trying to protect his poor Buenos Aires neighborhood. The charismatic Saga is a COP attendee who in one story leads a subversive street action, and in another, having grown up in a climate-refugee camp, is kidnapped. In other versions, she’s an installation artist, and a pop star who channels the grief and massive displacements of her world.

The characters’ alternate selves gave me that sense of an eerie echoing multiplicity that can emerge from good multiverse stories. In films, we’ve seen this not only in Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, but in Sliding Doors on an individual level, and in manic-epic style, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

In books, Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel, The Female Man, shows four connected yet different women on different planets in a twist on this approach which, like Our Shared Storm, tackles a massive issue—in that book, how misogyny distorts the self. In Our Shared Storm, the characters’ variations pull us through an emotional portal to help imagine things that are so scary and depressing, we might otherwise turn away from them.

Hudson brings a sharp eye and satirical flair to the conference negotiations, particularly in the over-the-top, hyper-capitalist scenario in which everyone wants to be an influencer and everyone is their own brand. The scenarios are arranged in a dramatic arc that gets steadily worse, and finally arrives at Scenario 1, the most hopeful of them all.

Here, the book aligns with Solarpunk, the emerging SFF genre that envisions people collaborating to cobble together a more community-based, environmentally sane future. I read this part with relief, feeling like the exhausted survivor of a shipwreck (or multiple shipwrecks!) finally washed ashore. But this possible future also felt fragile and tenuous, in need of protection.

The painful truth is that different parts of the world are experiencing these scenarios already. While the scary, depressing ones feel all too familiar, we do see seedlings of a more hopeful future. And we’re facing not only different possible futures, but different possible versions of ourselves. This book reminds us that our choices now are constructing the world ahead.