Pitched as The City & The City meets The Leftovers, ABSENCE is a propulsive mystery, combining the best elements of speculative fiction and detective noir, one which explores a world confronted with the new reality of Spontaneous Human Absence, or the sudden disappearance of people into thin air, never to return.
ABSENCE
by Andrew Dana Hudson
Soho Press, Spring 2026
(via Vertical Ink)
With millions around the world having already “popped” out of existence, and the numbers increasing daily, humanity’s long-term survival is now in doubt. Now, Bureau of Depopulation Affairs agents Harvey Ellis and Shonda Erins must unravel a mystery that could answer the impenetrable question of where the absent go, as one day a disheveled woman with no identification appears at the sheriff’s office in the small town of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming to have returned from Absence and providing a highly-detailed description of the “life after” and a mysterious post-Absence city called Strangertown.
Is she just another charlatan styling herself as a prophet, or is she really Gabby Reyes, a Dawnville teenager who popped a decade before under notorious circumstances? If true, her story holds the key to understanding humanity’s future and would give hope to the millions of people mourning the unfathomable disappearance of their loved ones – a group that also includes agent Ellis.
As the agents navigate a hostile town awash in conspiracy theories with its own secrets to hide, they get closer to the answer, and agent Ellis finds himself caught between his professional skepticism and his own personal desire for the possibility of hope in a hopeless world.
But as Absence begins to ravage Dawnville, the townspeople focus their ire on Gabby and the agents, and in a world where no one knows how long they have left, agents Ellis and Erins must unravel the mystery of Gabby Reyes before Dawnville explodes into violence, and before they themselves disappear.
Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, as well as over twenty-five short stories appearing in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and many more. His nonfiction has appeared in Slate, Jacobin, and others. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for the BSFA, and translated into Italian. Andrew has a master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University, where he is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing (fiction). He is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. His research, partnering with institutions like Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, uses speculative fiction to explore the entwined social and technical dynamics of future scenarios, particularly the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization and climate repair. He has previously worked in journalism, political consulting, and healthcare innovation. He also teaches yoga. Follow his work via solarshades.club.
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