Category: Speculative fiction reviews

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.

Susan Kaye Quinn’s ‘Nothing is Promised’ series consists of four novels, each leading into the next and, although they share many of the same characters, each one focuses on someone different as the main character. While I really enjoyed all the stories in the series, I also didn’t agree with some of what she looked at as a possible future–it’s definitely more hierarchical than the future I want to see–although that changes somewhat at the end.  In spite of that, I’d still very much recommend these books as exciting stories about a positive future.

When You Had Power is the first book in the series.  It’s about Lucia who is moving in with a communal family and has a new job at a “Power Island”.  When she realizes that there’s something happening on the island besides making power she investigates and almost gets herself killed–by employees of the island.  Fortunately her new family takes care of her, but she is determined to figure out what’s going on, and decides to take it to the Regional Director.  

In You Knew the Price (the second book) Zuri, the overworked Regional Director, is having a hard enough time balancing work and family life, but when she’s finally convinced there’s a big problem at the Power Island, she investigates and she and Lucia are nearly kidnapped.  Zuri begins to suspect someone has discovered a possible new energy source.  She decides she needs to bring this to a Public Utilities Commissioner who is also a former physicist.  

The third book, Of Kindness and Kilowatts, focuses on Akemi, Commissioner and physicist who is dealing with his father, a former physicist now falling apart.  But both of them become intrigued by this mysterious new energy source.  Akemi quietly tries to learn more from Ellis and Miller, the two men involved with this project.  Although they try to keep things secret, he becomes convinced they really have a new energy source.  He decides to talk with the Governor of Southern California. 

In Yet You Cry When It Hurts, the final book in the series, the Governor reaches out to Nitara, a director at the International Energy Consortium, who is already overloaded with negotiations and personal problems.  But she assembles a team (that includes Lucia, Zuri, and Akemi) to take on Ellis and Miller, who are now trying to blackmail the world into buying their new energies and return the world to the days of rich white men being in power, with them on the top.  

What I liked about the Nothing is Promised series was the books’ picture of lots of alternatives (communal living, found family, new forms of renewable energy, etc) and their appealing characters and focus on teamwork.  What I didn’t like was showing us a future that was still very hierarchical and with energy distributed from the top (centralized power).  I can’t help but compare it to the watershed councils in A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (which I will review in a future post about more new positive future stories) where power is built and run on the local level, in spite of still existing countries and corporations. 

This is somewhat mitigated in the final book when the new power source is declared a commons and the main characters decide to put “the people” in charge.  Maybe this is the author’s way of saying that this is the road we need to travel, but there is no hint of that until the end.  The books also seem to be saying that we need high tech solutions to our climate problems–and that seems to me to be true, unless we are willing to really change the way that we’re living (which is what I’m hoping).

Incidentally, I think the Nothing is Promised series and A Half-Built Garden are both very strong examples of the “Heroine’s Journey” (which I wrote about in my last post) where the characters use collaboration to accomplish what they need.  There is a scene in Yet You Cry When It Hurts where Nitara, the overworked director, tries to take on Miller and Ellis on her own and is basically saved by her team. In other words, she tries the Hero’s Journey but is made to see that she needs to be part of something bigger.  This is almost a clear affirmation of the Heroine’s Journey.  

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.