Category: Thoughts

I see solarpunk as an opportunity to let more people know about the enormous variety of alternatives available to all of us as we attempt to build small enclaves of new ways of living: communities, neighborhoods, villages, etc, and creatively network them together.  We can look at all the ways we can meet real needs for food, shelter, energy, transportation, communication, connection, safety, fairness, justice, and environmental restoration and resilience to name a few.

I’m particularly interested in figuring out how we can create more communal/cooperative/collective ways of living as well as using what I’d like to call sharing technologies: income-sharing, gift economies, library socialism, mutual aid networks, etc–but I’m also interested in figuring how we can incorporate everything from permaculture and passivhaus to relationship anarchy and transformative justice, plus much, much more into all the things we are creating. 

I choose to believe that we are doing more than writing exciting stories, that in solarpunk and other positive speculative fiction we are trying to create vivid possibilities that will inspire people to work to create these things in real life.  BF Skinner wrote Walden Two as utopian fiction but it inspired Kat Kinkade to create Twin Oaks, a real income-sharing community that’s now been running for almost sixty years.  What else could be built if it could be dreamt?  Maybe we can see.

Things these days look pretty bad. 

I don’t think we need much more in the way of dystopian fiction when things are crashing and burning around us.  In this blog I plan to focus on fictional futures that are both inspiring and seemingly realizable.

I plan to write a long series of book reviews here about hopeful speculative fiction from very classic utopias to recent solarpunk. I’m going to do this in several posts in the hope that this will encourage folks to read more of these positive stories and perhaps even do the hard work to make some of them come true.

I also plan to use this blog to publish some of the stories that I’ve written that explore more possibilities for possible futures. I’m also open to publishing hopeful stuff from other aspiring writers and I would love to collaborate with others to create simple joyful stories.

Justine Norton-Kertson’s book, Utopian Witch (subtitle Solarpunk Magick to Fight Climate Change and Save the World) is a book about magic and witchcraft but has some of the best explanations and origin stories about solarpunk that I’ve seen anywhere. (Justine Norton-Kertson is also the publisher of Solarpunkmagazine )

In the book, Justine Norton-Kertson writes: “Solarpunk is a wonderful example of speculative fiction that brings art and real-world activism together in a shared purpose–to create a better world. It’s still a relatively new subgenre of science fiction, and there’s plenty of disagreement about what qualifies as solarpunk. But there does seem to be a general agreement that we can use this genre as a foundation for understanding and exploration.

“The term solarpunk was coined in a 2008 article published on the blog Republic of the Bees. The article suggested a new literary genre grounded in futures with renewable energy and resource based economies. The article also laid out a very basic framework for the new literary genre by comparing it to steampunk, which at the time was enjoying its own moment in the sun.”