Recently I encountered the word ‘solarpunk’, and learned that it was a subgenre of science fiction that attacks the pessimism of cyberpunk by creating futures that are its opposite. In solarpunk settings, humanity has learned to grow with nature — using technology to harmonize with it instead of conquering it. I like the aesthetics of it, though its economic literacy is…questionable. Anyway, I wanted to try some fiction in that category.

First up was a Kindle Unlimited piece called Growing Seeds from Stones. This is a short beginning of a story set in a future where there’s been an ecological/environmental/economic collapse. Our main character, Moss, is a member of a new community built from the remnants of the old world: the city is closed to outsiders, and only those who can fulfill are a useful function or have skills to contribute are allowed in. Jobs are assigned based on the community’s needs, not anyone’s desires, and there’s stagnation and latent dissatisfaction as a result. Sandy and her best friend Moss are two such frustrated young people. When Sandy makes the radical choice to secretly leave the community in the middle of the night, Moss is inspired to get involved in the community’s politics — and that’s where it leads off. The setting is interesting, but the ending was jarring, as if the second half of the book is simply not there.

Next up was Solar Flare, a collection of solarpunk-inspired short stories from various authors. There’s a bit of a range, timewise: some are set a few decades away, others centuries. Unlike Metatropolis, they don’t share a same imagined future, though concepts are the same in both. There’s a good variety in the stories, all exploring different adaptations humans are making to worth with nature rather than ride roughshod over it, and these range from engineering to culture. In one story, for instance, we visit a team of women (“Umbrella Men”) who are tasked with repairing and re-orienting kilometer-sized veils in the upper atmosphere. These ‘umbrellas’ refract from sunlight, but also convey it into power that’s beamed down to Earth. The strangest one for me was “Lumen”, about a solar-based community in 1898 being persecuted by oil and gas interests: this seemed implausibly anachronistic, in part because I only associate solar power with conversion cells, and the means by which this town was employing solar power were not explained. Easily the most interesting story for me was “The Palmdale Community Newsletter”, in which a journalist tracks down an independent journalist who keeps writing articles about life in The Other America, a place that this indie journalist can see if he walks down a certain street: in this Other America, the United States took a very different turn after World War 2, pursuing sustainable energy and urban development instead of covering the good earth with oil-soaked parking lots and suburbs dominated by bee-hostile grass monocultures. The stories set closer to us tend to look at the consequences of our actions (like “Drips of Hope”, in which government agents try to persuade some towns people to relocate because there is no more water) , as well as “The Race on Dry Mississippi”, in which solar-powered vehicles race down the empty channel of the Mighty Missisippi. I was glad there was stories like “Drips of Hope” which examined environmental issues other than climate change. The biggest disappoint was “The Astronaut”, which had a fun premise (an astronaut put in stasis finds herself crash-landing on Earth in the late 24th century), but it ended very pompous lecture-y, as the Greenlanders (all Hispanic, interestingly) arrest the astronaut for possessing rocket fuel and go on and on and on about her ignorance and sin. All told, though, I liked the variety of the stories, and the central message about hope, human resilience, and ‘biophilic design’, which is something I want to read more about. It sounds a bit like permaculture on on a different scale.

Coming up: volcanoes and maybe Chinese SF!