Andrew Dana Hudson on His Creative Journey and Latest Work
By Zakkary Parker
What happens when a crisis has no blatant cause?
Writer, sustainability researcher, and critical futurist Andrew Dana Hudson addresses this question boldly with his debut novel, Absence. In this Midwestern Noir, the global catastrophe isn’t a storm or a devastating flood – it’s a “pop.” People spontaneously vanish into thin air with no explanation, leaving behind a dismayed society desperate for answers.
With no way to confront the crisis, or ensure some sense of normalcy, the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs emerges, sending agents like Harvey Willis to certify disappearances and distribute stipends for the families of victims. But when a supposedly “Absent” woman reappears, claiming to have been to “the other side” and back, Harvey’s routine job is transformed into a high-stakes investigation into truth, grief, and survival that he must tackle with his partner Shonda Erins.
It’s a daring and unique premise, but for Hudson, grappling with expansive and systemic issues isn’t unfamiliar territory. Long before Absence, or even the concept of popping existed, he had already found his voice within the speculative fiction realm. “I’ve been at this now for 10 years, but I really think you can even go back to my grade school papers,” said Hudson in a Zoom interview. “And I’ve done those things from third grade where I was like, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna be a science fiction writer.’ Apparently it was always destiny.”
He explains that his love for writing grew from the solace it provided that he was unable to find in other places. Science and speculative fiction provided an outlet for Hudson to process what was going on in the world around him with both clarity and creativity. “I’ve been sort of using science fiction as my way of making sense of the world. And some people, when they’re trying to understand what’s happening around them, they compare it to history, they compare it to other countries, right?” he said. “We all have a comparative mode, or at least a lot of us do. And I was comparing it to ideas that I’d read about what was gonna happen in the future through science fiction, or what could happen in other worlds, places and timelines.”
It is this practice of using fictional mediums as a critical lens for present, real-world issues, that connects Hudson’s work with the mission of the Center for Science and the Imagination. For Hudson, an already established name in climate fiction circles and futures-thinking communities, the book marks a pivot. He explains that when he first began the writing process for Absence, he had no plans of turning it into a full-length novel, but rather a short story. However, what initially started off as just an opening scene quickly grew. As Hudson continued exploring both the world and characters in it, he found himself fleshing out the story even more, and in turn, expanding the project far beyond his original plan.
“A month later, I’m getting to novelette length and I’m still not finished. And I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe this is like a novella,’ and I just keep pressing,” said Hudson. “And then a year after that, I have a 400-page manuscript. So it kind of snuck up on me, which I actually think was helpful.” But the novel’s growth wasn’t limited to word count. One of its central ideas, “popping”, has also come an incredibly long way from its earliest form.
The concept initially came to him in March of 2021 during the later half of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the uncertainty and slow unfolding of the pandemic that significantly inspired the creation of Hudson’s unsettling phenomenon. “I was like ‘What if it was one by one by one, and it was just always looking over your shoulder and feeling this immense dread and pressure to protect yourself from an invisible force that
could reach into your life, and take you out or take out someone you loved at any point?,” said Hudson. “And you could try and do all these things to prevent or stop it, but in the end, it felt so random.”
Many of the elements and experiences found within Absence purposely mirror the events that took place during the pandemic. Hudson explains that he imagined the novel’s world as an extension of that initial year of crisis, one where the chaos and upheaval didn’t falter after twelve months, and instead, stretched over a decade.
During 2020, society adapted to the pandemic at an incredible pace, with new systems, services, and technology arising seemingly overnight. Absence pushes those concepts even further, playing with role-reversals of what we lived through, like replacing isolation with forced togetherness and contact. Hudson describes this world-building process as his way of attempting to make sense of one of the many different layers of the pandemic experience.
“I think we have this dream that in a crisis all the complexity gets shed and then boiled down to what really matters. And we just act, and it’s like, no. That just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t happen,” said Hudson.
All of these characteristics – the pandemic’s lingering impacts, the expanding narrative, and the book’s deliberate role reversals – emphasize one of Hudson’s fundamental principles as a writer: resisting didactic storytelling and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. When asked about any takeaways he hoped readers would leave with, Hudson emphasized the novel’s resistance to clarity as a whole.
“I feel like with a book like this, it’s a sort of cosmic mystery that is all about uncertainty as opposed to moral certainty, or even certainty about anything,” said Hudson. “Uncertainty is the heart of Harvey’s experience for the whole novel, which is very frustrating to him because that’s all he wants. Then, you know, leaving readers who have any kind of clear message is not the move, right? The move is to leave them wrestling with possibility just like for a part of this. And in speculative fiction, this is often how we work.”
Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut novel “Absence” is available now from Soho Press.