Twenty-First Century Solarpunk, etc

This millennium has brought a lot of interesting takes on the future.  I want to look at solarpunk, but also hopepunk, Afrofuturism, and some interesting cli-fi. Let me start with some of the many collections of solarpunk stories.

One of the earliest was SOLARPUNK (subtitle Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World), a collection of nine stories by Brazilian and Portuguese authors (only one by a woman) translated into English and the cultural differences with American influenced solarpunk are interesting. It was one of the first books to use the term ‘solarpunk’. These are not only not very utopian, but they are often violent and sometimes cynical.  While some of the stories didn’t appeal to me, I did like the two alternate history tales (“Once Upon a Time in a World” and ”Xibalba Dreams of the West”) and “Sun In the Heart” about solar tattoos.

Then there are two collections with the name “Glass and Gardens”

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers has a diverse collection of seventeen short stories focused around surviving the hot weather of the future.  The stories range from kids trying to fix the world to a solarpunk whodunnit to a heist pulled off by a collective of art punks to tales of starting over on new worlds (my least liked idea–trash the earth and move on).. I found it a fun read but looking at reviews of the book others found the quality of the stories mixed.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters is another collection of short stories, in this case where there’s cold weather in the future in spite of (or because of) climate change–or where people are trying to recreate it. The stories vary from preserving the contents of the Svalbard Seed Vault to keeping winter in glass houses to a tale of the art punk collective from Solarpunk Summers rescuing a snowed-in village.  The story “Rules for a Civilization” made me appreciate sports for the first time.

Multispecies Cities  (subtitle Solarpunk Urban Futures) is a collection of twenty-four stories focusing on city living, connections with non-human life, and an Asian or Pacific Ocean connection.  They range from researchers looking for tigers in Vladivostok to a high-tech soldier who finds his place in a Japanese garden to two stories about life on Mars. There’s also surveys at the beginning and end of the book to see what effect the book has on you.

Bright Green Futures 2024 is a collection of solarpunk stories by various authors and edited by Susan Kaye Quinn, that range from navigating a rainstorm (and a life) in flooded Brazil to confronting strange creatures on a space station to being saved by a mycorrhizal network to preserving cultural identity on a flooded island through food to finding a new species of bat. Plus imagining a monster trapped in a park. My favorite story was “A Merger in Corn Country” about cultural change in Missouri.

Susan Kaye Quinn wrote all the stories in Halfway to Better, a collection of short solarpunk stories featuring underwater exploration, clones trapped in a tower, an old woman being rescued from a lighthouse, reparation hunting in the abandoned cities of the super-rich, a world where people no longer burn things, saving the rainforest and the family farm, and seed spreading from the sky.  Plus there’s a couple of queer romances and a “sky shanty”.

Two authors whose work has been called solarpunk are Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson.  Here’s my reviews of a couple of books by each of them.

Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway starts as solarpunk with some cyberpunk added but quickly turns into mainly cyberpunk with little bits of solarpunk.  There are useful discussions about abundance and group process in the book.  I don’t like how high tech it is or how violent it gets, or the idea you can use tech to cheat death, but I love the notion that you can respond to violence and destruction by just walking away and starting something new.

Cory Doctorow’s The Lost Cause is a solarpunk story about the fight for the future, between various progressives, leftists, and eco-organizers and builders (who have ideological disagreements among themselves) on one side and violent MAGA bigots and rich libertarians on the other. Much of the battles (including immigration struggles and California wildfires) will seem only too familiar. The book makes it clear that there’s a long struggle ahead.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is definitely not a utopia, but it’s not exactly a dystopia either.  In fact, it seems almost a continuation of the status quo except that NYC is flooded, people travel in blimps (and sometimes live in them in “skyvillages”), and the AIs are more advanced and have more personality.  The book does have a somewhat hopeful conclusion, but the author (in the person of an anonymous “Citizen”) rather directly warns us that “There are no happy endings.”  

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future has one of the most horrifying openings I’ve read (as people are baked and boiled to death in India) but carefully and slowly maps out a pathway out of climate change. It’s slow and long and has Robinson’s sometimes cutesy chapters as well as many info dumps and an assortment of characters including the story of  Mary Murphy who heads the ministry. It provides some unusual positive ideas amid lots of socio-economic and technological ones. 

I would describe Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk as AfroFuturist solarpunk.  It’s about a wildly diverse group of folks dealing with a dystopian future situation with a lot of hope and ingenuity.  It has theater, creativity, magic, humor, and community, as well as very creative alternatives, from the Ghost Mall (turning an abandoned mall into a place people can live) to the Co-Op Clinic (cooperative medical care by folks who’ve left the mainstream health care system).  There’s also dogs, bots, and spirits.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (Binti, Home, and The Night Masquerade) are Afro-futurist hopepunk about Binti, a mathematically oriented resident of future Earth, who survives a massacre and then takes on part of the invading force’s identity and slowly takes on other identities.  How to understand your enemies? Listen to them and become part of them. These books are an exploration of what identity means and a look at ancestral and tribal perspectives.

Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy are hopepunk stories that imagine a planet where people have abandoned machines (particularly robots which somehow became self aware) and live in a simple, ecological style. Unfortunately humans are here because the earth has been trashed and they are now trying to do better. In these books a “tea monk” goes off into the wilderness and encounters a robot who has been looking for humans to learn what humans want–it’s the quest of these novels. 

I suppose you could call M E O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone radical leftist hopepunk.  It’s a history of the future told through interviews with members of the New York Commune from sex workers to healthcare workers to a member of the North American Liberation Front.  This is somewhat of a Marxist communist utopia brought by rebellion and armed struggle, but it includes space elevators and algae based AI, as well as gender fluidity and “family abolition”.

And then there’s some novels that aren’t exactly solarpunk or hopepunk but aren’t exactly dystopian either.

Nick Fuller Googins’ The Great Transition starts off as a family drama before becoming a thriller where you don’t know who to trust.  It has a future with many of the same corporations around as we have today, only now they’re cooperatives, and they celebrate the day the world reached net-zero emissions.  There’s a lot that I don’t agree with here (especially using violence to achieve equality) but I like that when they reach zero emissions they say, “It’s not over.  It’s only just begun.”

Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest is not a typical post-apocalyptic novel.  The collapse that happened (called The Arrest) doesn’t actually make sense.  Things just stopped working–and the descriptions of it happening seem more like fantasy, or more likely, metaphor.   I have the feeling this book wants to be “literature” rather than science-fiction or solarpunk, but it does describe rather nicely a simple, post-industrial future.  A very unlikely possible future, though.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War is not really utopian but a bloody romance between two time agents, one working for a solarpunk future called “Garden” and one working for a cyberpunk future referred to as “The Agency”.  Unfortunately neither is described but it ends with the two agents, who started as rivals and finish as lovers, deciding to build a bridge to a place where they can be together, becoming walkaways from both futures I suppose.

Finally, here’s a couple of more visual takes on the future.

Hiroshi Ashinano’s Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is a manga series that straddles the centuries, running from 1994 to 2006.  It shows the end of the world as a slow, gentle, bittersweet experience.  It’s set “long after an environmental catastrophe”.  Alpha is an android who looks like a young woman and manages a coffee shop for an owner who is long gone.  She has few customers. The sea is slowly reclaiming the land. It’s hard to get around because the roads are in disrepair. This is the apocalypse as a very gentle and sweet decline.

Sarah Mirk’s Open Earth is an often erotic (ie, soft porn) graphic novel which imagines a very collective life in a space station orbiting earth.  I liked the communal nature of it, the open sexuality, and the basic premise of a new generation making this venture their own in ways the older folks haven’t imagined.  What I didn’t like was the reason they are in a space station was that they abandoned earth as it was collapsing. Yet one more “trash the earth and move on” story where they say that they want to live more ecologically, this time.

I’m still reading lots of stuff and plan to write a bunch more reviews in the future.