I’m continuing to look for and read positive speculative fiction. Here’s some of my more recent finds. (All of these were Mastodon posts, which is why they’re so concise.)
“The Year Without Sunshine” is one of the best stories I’ve read about postindustrial mutual aid. A disaster happens, sunlight is diminished, and electricity is intermittent. The neighbors band together to help each other. The teamwork is beautiful. My favorite line is when a kid shows up and is questioned why he wants to join them and says, “Because I want to live somewhere that people take care of each other.”
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/
In Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor aliens land near Lagos, Nigeria, and transform the city and the country (with implications for the world). Not exactly solarpunk but definitely hopepunk. Really, if aliens were going to land, I think Lagos would be a better starting place than somewhere in the US. An intense but fun read.
Nnedi Okorafor’s LaGuardia is a graphic novel sequel to her story Lagoon. She wrote in her Afterward: “I’ve begun to feel a strong need to write narratives that… showcase an optimistic future. This led me to write Lagoon and the Binti trilogy… LaGuardia was… set a few years after Lagoon.” It’s a colorful and fun read about some very plant-like aliens.
I loved Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk. Mindscape, her first novel, is a large, complex, and intense story of how humanity copes with alien barriers dividing the earth into three habitable areas filled with visionaries, gangsters, video makers, actors, throwbacks, politicians, and diplomats–and lots of conflicted people. This novel has quite the kick. Read it when you’re ready to dive deep.
Naomi Kritzner’s Liberty’s Daughter isn’t solar punk or utopian fiction. It’s about a privileged young woman living on a libertarian ‘seastead’ on the ocean and using her privilege to liberate bond-workers and debt slaves and working folk there. It ends with folks trying to remake the place. I guess it might be hope punk because it’s certainly more hopeful than grim. (And, Naomi Kritzner is also the author of one of my favorite stories, “The Year Without Sunshine”.)
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation is an anthology that has not only solarpunk stories, but solarpunk poems and pictures. There’s a variety of stuff here but, for me, the standout story was the first one, “The Boston Hearth Project” by TX Watson which describes how some activists took over a luxury eco-sustainable building and turned it into housing for the homeless. The rest of the stories, poems, and artwork were good, but didn’t hit me as hard.
Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is an anthology of speculative fiction by non-white authors. It’s not all Afrofuturism since there are many non-Black authors and it’s not all optimistic either, but my two favorite tales are: Jaymee Goh, “Between Islands” is a fun Asian decolonial steampunk story and Nini Shawl, “Good Boy” is a wild fusion of voodoo, funk, and ‘70s transpersonal psychedelica.
Dilman Dila writes: “The Blossoming of the Big Tree is now out. … The paperback version will be ready in a month’s time. … The only problem will be shipping. For those outside of Uganda, it might cost more than the book. And since there are postal restrictions on packages to the US, we won’t be able to send anything there, unless the reader is willing to pay over $100 on courier fees. (Please don’t! Use that money to buy books for your local library!)”
I read an excerpt and it sounded great (African solarpunk) and I wanted to order it, but I live in the US and I don’t read e-books, so I’m disappointed I won’t be able to get it.
So here’s someone who has actually read Dilman Dila’s novella, The Blossoming of the Big Tree and reviewed it:
https://hollysreadingescapades.blogspot.com/2026/06/book-review-blossoming-of-big-tree-by.html
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys is a queer solarpunk first contact story with so many little kids in it that someone referred to it as diaperpunk. The problem is that the aliens (who arrive just as humanity is getting its act together and learning to live with the earth) want to save everyone by taking all the humans off the planet whether we like it or not. And then things get complicated. A lovely story about family where family grows in spite of doing many things wrong.
I found Mariame Kaba’s “Justice: A Short Story” in an unexpected place, her very nonfiction book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, a book about “Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice”. She wanted to imagine “another world where punishment is not part of the glue that holds a society together.” I’m not sure I like the ending but it’s definitely hopeful speculative fiction, portraying a world where there are no prisons and with a male mother and nonbinary father.
“An Important Failure” by Rebecca Campbell is a story about a man who hears a fifteen year old violin prodigy and decides to build her a profoundly good instrument. It takes decades to make and by then she’s a mother and no longer plays professionally. She also realizes it will take perhaps centuries for this violin to season. In the background, ecosystem changes are happening. This is a story about the importance of slow work. The author apparently expanded it into the novella Arboreality.
I found Ellis Nye’s “The Last Great Repair Tech of the American Midwest” while studying the genre ‘soft apocalypse’. It’s a slice of life from a future where everything is falling apart. It purports to be an obituary for a woman who spent her life fixing things. According to this obituary, she seemed always willing to help out and because of her, many things lasted a lot longer than they would have otherwise. This is a declining postindustrial future where people care for each other.
Sarah Gailey’s “Drones to Ploughshares” is a lovely hopepunk tale about an enforcement drone in a future where companies and the government control the population and particularly the farming communities. One community, however, chose to be illegally free of all this, and care for each other and even the sentient drones that come their way, and they are offering the latest drone sent in to check on them a choice. The drone slowly begins to realize that they are offering freedom.
“I’m Rare” is a story/fable by adrienne maree brown in her collection Fables and Spells. It’s a complex tale about a human turned ‘computer’ who falls in love and becomes involved with a collective of three former humans who are now a ‘network’, a ‘three-body system’. The narrator even talks about unusual ways of them achieving procreation and pregnancy. This story is really about the desire for belonging and “collective intimacy” as well as enjoying both connection and difference.
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