Category: Nonfiction and quotes

Solarpunk and utopian fiction point us toward ways of being and living together that many folks may not have even thought of.  The goal isn’t to depict the “correct” way we could be living in the future, the goal is to show that there are many possible ways and there should be many possibilities, that what the future looks like may vary from place to place.

In her book, Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown talks about “Creating More Possibilities” as an essential part of her strategy:  “… where we shape tomorrow towards abundance.”  She says, “…in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world.  We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist. … The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world.”

My only problem with “creating more possibilities” is that there are folks (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, Modi, etc) who are busy trying to create possibilities that I fear are very hurtful to people.  I want to see us “producing more positive possibilities”–ones that support people and the planet and I think we need to produce lots and lots of them.

In adrienne maree brown’s book Loving Corrections, she quotes Ursula Leguin as saying: “I create alternatives. I show that alternatives exist. Probably the sum total of my messages to the world is that you do not have to do it one way.” 

I also like what Octavia Butler says in A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: “…there’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems.  There’s no magic bullet.  Instead there are thousands of answers–at least.”  

And what Mariame Kaba says in her book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: “I’ve been talking to folks about the importance of us building a million different little experiments, just building and trying and taking risks…  And the issue is to figure out which alternative works for what situation.” 

So that’s what I hope solarpunk and utopian works show: that “alternatives exist,” that there are many positive possibilities, “thousands of answers,” “a million different little experiments,” “in order to create a world that works for more people.”

I’m mostly going to focus on fiction here, but I will occasionally talk about nonfiction stuff if it seems (at least to me) to be related to what I’m discussing here.

For example, here’s two books that describe the path to the future I want to see. The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit and The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger would seem to have little in common (other than both being nonfiction books written by women), one focusing on our current situation and the other on story writing, but they both talk a lot about relationships and building interconnections, seeing this work as essential.     

Rebecca Solnit’s book The Beginning Comes After the End is basically a reminder that there has been a movement in this society over the past decades toward embracing all people and living in harmony with the earth and the problems we are struggling with are caused by elites who don’t want to give up power and who want us to return to the days when they controlled everything.  For me solarpunk describes the life that she believes we are struggling toward. 

The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger is about looking at two types of fictional stories, the ‘Hero’s Journey’ and the ‘Heroine’s Journey’, the difference being less about gender and more about the basic plot, whether it’s a person struggling to triumph alone or they’re someone working with others to build something together.  She believes the Heroine could be male or the Hero could be a woman.  I think her ‘Heroine’s Journey’ describes the stories I want to create.  

These books mirror each other.  Solnit talks about the world we’re moving from, saying that “It’s symbolized by the lone man, the superhero, soldier, cowboy…” which is almost exactly the “Hero” that Carriger is reacting against.  Gail C says, “The Heroine’s Journey is one of building teams, creating cohesions, forming social relationships… It also seeks balance and compromise.”   That could describe the process Rebecca S thinks we need to go through.