Absence by friend of the newsletter Andrew Dana Hudson is now out, and I can’t recommend it enough! If you didn’t preorder it during our epic alternative history crossover event, you can rectify that now. I woke up every day excited to read more of this speculative mystery. No major plot spoilers follow, but I went in knowing only that Andrew wrote it, and I recommend that experience! Absence goes quick, and this letter will be here when you’re done.

Absence is set in a world where people have been randomly “popping” out of existence for decades. No one left on Earth knows where they went, or if they’re still alive in wherever that place might be. Early in the book, it’s suggested that one possible destination is a city that draws people to it over the course of several pops. English speakers are said to call the place Strangertown. People from all over the world and/or multiverse might end up there, rebuilding civilization with what they happened to have with them when they popped (the clothes they were wearing, the ebooks downloaded to their smartphones). Or just as possible, Strangertown might not exist at all.

The promise of Strangertown enchants many of the characters in Absence, and it enchanted me, too. Reading the book happened to coincide with an assignment that has me reading and thinking about Teotihuacan, one of the ancient world’s most studied and also most mysterious sites. Archaeologists know it was a huge city of 100,000 people, and they know those people came from all over Mesoamerica to live there. They don’t know how Teotihuacan was governed—a monarchy, or something more collective?—what language(s) its people communicated in, or why they built the city the way they did. Teotihuacan looks like no other city in Mesoamerica before or since, with a grid layout, ethnic enclaves, comfortable apartments, and strikingly low economic inequality. It’s the urban ideal, invented from scratch by people who otherwise had little in common.

Archaeologists also don’t know what the people who lived in Teotihuacan called their city; the current name is drawn from what the much later Nahuatl-speaking Mexica called its ruins (meaning something like “the birthplace of the gods”). Reading Absence, I thought, maybe they called it Strangertown.

There’s this pervasive idea about the present and the past that people move, especially to cities, because they’re seeking economic benefits: more opportunities, access to trade networks, a promising future for the next generation. According to our inescapably capitalist modern assumptions, meeting new kinds of people and figuring out how to work together with them are presented as, at best, tangential to the supposedly more universal drive toward materially richer and more comfortable lives. But in keeping with our recent “monuments built civilization” thinking, what if being among strangers wasn’t a side effect (or a potential downside) of the beginnings of urbanization, but the entire point? The original motivation? An experience so enthralling you would create a whole new kind of society just to keep having it?