Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards a Solarpunk Future

Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards a Solarpunk Future
thedorkweb.substack.com

I would like more SF authors working mostly within the constraints of known physics and considering how ecosystems work as well as considering the engineering details of their fictional spacecraft. Kim Stanley Robinson, cited in this article, is one of the finest authors currently doing that. But I don't think that he has described his own work as solarpunk. Most of his novels feature cooperation and institutions on a large scale, along with a more sophisticated and larger technological base than Earth currently has. If his novels are solarpunk, most of them are incompatible with this exhortation to solarpunk in the article:

Solarpunk should move quietly and plant things. Don’t ask permission from a state beholden to oligarchs, and definitely don’t expect those oligarchs to do any of this for you. Guerilla gardening is the model, but look further. Guerilla solar panel installation. Guerilla water treatment facility restoration. Guerilla magnificent temple to the human spirit construction. Guerilla carbon sequestration megastructure creation.

...

When Andrew Dana Hudson talks of guerilla solar panel installation he’s not joking. These things are real. The reason you don’t know about them is because these are things you build, not buy. Daniel Connell has tutorials for all kinds of tech. He has a $30 1Kw Wind Turbine, a $5 water filter and a $5 combustion stove built almost entirely from recycled parts.

You can't guerilla garden your way to a solar panel factory, megastructures, or space colonies. The solutions to the vast lingering hangover of 20th century problems, like global warming, are going to be vast as well if they are to be solutions at all. Just dodging The Man and doing your own thing when he's not looking is not a hopeful vision of the future. It's an admission of defeat. It's saying that institutions suck and will continue to suck, so we might as well spend our lives LARPing.

I think that some of this failure of vision is because English speaking readers and writers of SF imagine that the corruptions specific to their local institutions are global. They suppose that every country has a local oil lobby, a local copyright lobby, a local pharma lobby. Therefore the failure of American institutions to take climate change seriously, or to really balance copyright for the long term best interests of the public, is insoluble everywhere. But this is not true! Other countries are not free of special interests but their institutions favor different special interests. There are countries where fossil fuels are nothing more than an irritating import dependency, and there's no domestic lobbying to burn fossils longer than technically necessary. But since the UK, US, Canada, and Australia all produce large quantities of fossil fuels, it feels like the political sway of those industries is more universal than it actually is.

Punk music was born as an expression of the cultural and economic alienation of youth in Thatcher's UK. Cyberpunk was the extrapolation of this into a world defined by the trends of the 1980s: accelerating technology that dehumanizes, unchecked globalization, runaway capitalism that leaves a permanent underclass to make do with the castoffs of the elite. Its enduring popularity is no doubt due to the fact that these trends are very much with us today.

Offshoots adapted this to the fears of other eras: Steampunk replaced accelerating solid-state technology with industrial-revolution mechanical technology. Dieselpunk traded it for the terrifying innovations in mechanized warfare of the early 20th Century.

Egalitarian societies living in clean cities powered by sustainable energy are not punk; they are worlds that would lack the need for a punk subculture. They are hopeful, utopian visions – and just as dystopias warn, the value of utopias is to inspire.

Maybe "solar utopianism" doesn't sound as cool as "solarpunk." But calling it what it is will let us appreciate it for what it is.