lost prophets of the hockey-stick: an interview with Andrew Dana Hudson (part 1)
The first part of a long interview with solarpunk auteur and futurist-for-hire Andrew Dana Hudson, in which we discuss sci-fi, cli-fi, muay thai and wi-fi. (Actually, not those last two.)
When I started recording interviews for this journal, not quite a year ago, Andrew Dana Hudson’s was the very first in the queue.
That’s partly because I was very keen to discuss worldbuilding with the writer who surely has the best claim to the sceptre of solarpunk as a literary form... but also because he was the quickest to respond in the positive when I sent out the first batch of queries.
By way of explanation, as well as in the name of full disclosure, I should probably note that we’d known each other for a while prior to this discussion. That is also my partial excuse for this being rather closer to a rambling conversation than an interview: it can be quite a challenge to retain one’s ethnographical composure when the larger part of your brain just wants to kick ideas around with a good friend!
As such, this first of two (long) parts sees us discuss science fiction as a sensemaking strategy, the death of “The Future”, the utility of climate fiction, and the way that time turns all science fiction into fantasy in the long run.
(We get round to worldbuilding more directly in the second part, but trust me—though we may not use that term in this first part, it’s all very germane to that topic. This is also a very referential conversation, so I’m providing links for stuff we pass over quickly that may not be so well known to you, dear reader.)
But we started in a way that surely set the tone! I was sat on my sofa in front of my bookshelves, which prompted Andrew to ask...
ADH: ... is that the Illuminatus! trilogy I see behind your shoulder?
PGR: It is, yeah. Two different copies, actually—one is three separate paperbacks, one is the single volume, and I don’t know why I have two copies.
ADH: It’s a conspiracy!
PGR: Clearly, yes, it is.
I haven’t read it for a long time. I was given it by a very good friend of mine back in the day, and it basically had completely opposite effects on us, in that he got really, really heavily into conspiracy theory stuff, whereas when I finished it I found myself thinking “oh, we’re all just kind of projecting agency into a space where there’s no person in charge, because it’s comforting!” Whereas he went fairly down the rabbit hole… although, thinking of events subsequent to that, it did become apparent that there may have been some cogs loose in the works already… and he may have exacerbated that by being very, very fond of acid, and taking an awful lot of it.
ADH: My mom was always trying to give me books that she found that seemed like they aligned with my interests, and I had a moment of being really interested in physics. So she finds a Robert Anton Wilson book called Quantum Psychology and just gives it to me without really knowing who this guy is…
PGR: Okay, wow.
ADH: I was fourteen, thirteen, something like that? And all of a sudden I’m reading about doing ayahuasca in the desert, and then reading a whole lot of the Robert Anton Wilson stuff, the Illuminatus trilogy… just one of many gifting choices that my mom made, sending me down weird rabbit holes that ended up being, you know, really interesting, but not quite where she was actually trying to point me.
