Andrew Dana Hudson is one of the authors who contributed to our anthology, No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. His story – an excerpt from Our Shared Storm – manages the difficult task of making carbon dioxide removal truly entertaining, and also addresses the issues around the ethics of excessive wealth and inequality.
The No More Fairy Tales anthology emerged from a project where climate experts were teamed with great writers to deliver 24 short stories. Each has one or more climate solutions at its heart. Kim Stanley Robinson allowed us to use three chapters from his epic Ministry for the Future. Paolo Bacigalupi contributed one of his more positive visions of the future in a wonderful story – a family drama set in a world with quiet electric buses, renewable energy and a wonderfully ambiguous AI character.
Thanks, as ever, go to Change Agents UK who sponsored the project, Wren James from the Climate Fiction Writers’ League, and Steve Willis from Herculean Climate Solutions for helping to bring it all together.
No More Fairy Tales was shared at COP27 and COP28 and at net zero meetings with UK MPs. Each story and each climate solution links to webpages where readers can follow up on any actions that inspire them.
Andrew Dana Hudson, author of Our Shared Storm
Andrew knows all about climate policies and sustainability. He received a Master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University, where he is a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination. He’s also an award-winning writer, so was perfect for this anthology.
A short excerpt from Our Shared Storm
Diya hated talking to rich people, but she was good at it. She was one herself, or had been, though that sense of isolated entitlement never quite leaves you, she feared. The lingering rich needed most to be made to feel that they were winning, in charge, going of their own free will, even as the sea overtook them. So, that’s what Diya offered them.
“This, my esteemed friends, is the kind of glory your money can buy.”
Diya stood at the prow, shouting to be heard over the wind and the waves and the low hum of the sail yacht’s electric control motor. Her audience sat on cushioned benches bolted to the deck of the boat. They drank mimosas and wore gold ‘VIP’ badges which glinted in the summer sun, an ego-stroking touch Diya was particularly fond of.
She waved at the octagonal structure looming ahead of them. It looked impressively industrial, in that very 20th-century way. But was also draped with greenery, vertical crops hanging in sheets from four of the sides. Around the structure, the open ocean was broken by smaller works – a farming flotilla of rafts and buoys, beneath which hung yet more crops: kelp, scallops, mussels, fish traps, and soil bags growing a dozen kinds of artisanal aquatic vegetables. It was one of the more impressive offshore agriculture projects in the region, providing significant fish protein to nearby Buenos Aires and helping reduce local acidification levels in the surrounding waters. But Diya wanted to keep her audience’s attention on the rig.
Andrew, please tell us more about this story.
Climate change is all about our collective choices. That’s why my book Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures doesn’t depict one outcome for the next thirty years, but five diverging ones. They show how culture, politics, and individual lives are determined by the path of climate action we choose. Inspired by the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways framework, this novel-in-stories turns our potential trajectories into or out of disaster into engaging literature that Kim Stanley Robinson called “by turns, and often all at once, ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful.” One pathway is included in No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet.
What’s next for you?
My next book, Absence: A Novel, was released on May 5th, 2026 from Soho Press. In this cosmic mystery, a supernatural epidemic of human vanishing examines how we deal with sprawling, civilization-wide disasters like climate change and pandemics. It’s also a twisty detective story about finding hope amid decline and loss. Manda Scott called it “fascinating, shiningly clever, and thought-provoking. A thriller wrapped in dystopian almost-horror wrapped in a perfect enigma.”
Thanks for contributing to No More Fairy Tales and for being our Author of the Month.
Thanks for having me.
