Adam Rakunas
Adam Rakunas is an American science fiction author whose work in the labour-focused science fiction subgenre has earned him considerable critical respect. He lives in the Los Angeles area and has worked in the technology industry, an experience that informs his fiction’s engagement with questions of labour, corporate power, and the organisation of work in speculative futures. He is also a home brewer, and his detailed knowledge of fermentation and distillation is put to loving use in his fiction’s central premise.
Windswept (2015), available on WritersReview, introduces Padma Mehta, a labour organiser on a distant world whose economy is built around the production of rum — specifically, the highly sophisticated fermentation technology that makes the planet’s signature product. When Padma tries to retire from union work, she finds herself pulled back in by a series of escalating crises involving corporate sabotage, indentured workers attempting to escape their contracts, and the fragile political ecology of a world that exists at the margins of interstellar corporate capitalism. Its sequel, Like a Boss (also on WritersReview), continues Padma’s adventures with the same combination of rum-soaked world-building, sharp labour politics, and propulsive plotting.
Rakunas’s work occupies a valuable niche in contemporary science fiction: politically engaged without being didactic, technically detailed without being dry, and consistently entertaining. His portrait of a labour organiser as a science fiction hero — practical, resourceful, deeply committed to the people she represents, and deeply suspicious of anyone in a suit — is a genuine contribution to the genre’s ongoing conversation about work, power, and dignity. The rum economy of Padma’s world is one of the more inventive and lovingly realised details in recent SF world-building.
Rakunas has also published short fiction and continues to be active in the science fiction community. His work demonstrates the genre’s capacity for genuine political imagination — for speculating not just about technology but about the social and economic structures that technology enables — and his protagonist remains one of the more distinctive and appealing in recent American science fiction. The Windswept novels are essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction and labour politics.
