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alpaca-clouds · 8 months
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The history of Solarpunk
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Okay, I guess this has to be said, because the people will always claim the same wrong thing: No, Solarpunk did not "start out as an aesthetic". Jesus, where the hell does this claim even come from? Like, honestly, I am asking.
Solarpunk started out as a genre, that yes, did also include design elements, but also literary elements. A vaguely defined literary genre, but a genre never the less.
And I am not even talking about those early books that we today also claim under the Solarpunk umbrella. So, no, I am not talking about Ursula K. LeGuin, even though she definitely was a big influence on the genre.
The actual history of Solarpunk goes something like that: In the late 1990s and early 2000s the term "Ecopunk" was coined, which was used to refer to books that kinda fit into the Cyberpunk genre umbrella, but were more focused on ecological themes. This was less focused on the "high tech, high life" mantra that Solarpunk ended up with, but it was SciFi stories, that were focused on people interacting with the environment. Often set to a backdrop of environmental apocalypse. Now, other than Solarpunk just a bit later, this genre never got that well defined (especially with Solarpunk kinda taking over the role). As such there is only a handful of things that ever officially called themselves Ecopunk.
At the same time, though, the same sort of thought was picked up in the Brazilian science fiction scene, where the idea was further developed. Both artistically, where it got a lot of influence from the Amazofuturism movement, but also as an ideology. In this there were the ideas from Ecopunk as the "scifi in the ecological collaps" in there, but also the idea of "scifi with technology that allows us to live within the changing world/allows us to live more in harmony with nature".
Now, we do not really know who came up with the idea of naming this "Solarpunk". From all I can find the earliest mention of the term "Solarpunk" that is still online today is in this article from the Blog Republic of Bees. But given the way the blogger talks about it, it is clear there was some vague definition of the genre before it.
These days it is kinda argued about whether that title originally arose in Brazil or in the Anglosphere. But it seems very likely that the term was coined between 2006 and 2008, coming either out of the Brazilian movement around Ecopunk or out of the English Steampunk movement (specifically the literary branch of the Steampunk genre).
In the following years it was thrown around for a bit (there is an archived Wired article from 2009, that mentions the term once, as well as one other article), but for the moment there was not a lot happening in this regard.
Until 2012, when the Brazilian Solarpunk movement really started to bloom and at the same time in Italy Commando Jugendstil made their appearance. In 2012 in Brazil the anthology "Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável" was released (that did get an English translation not too long ago) establishing some groundwork for the genre. And Commando Jugendstil, who describe themselves as both a "Communication Project" and an "Art Movement", started to work on Solarpunk in Italy. Now, Commando Jugendstil is a bit more complicated than just one or the other. As they very much were a big influence on some of the aesthetic concepts, but also were releasing short stories and did some actual punky political action within Italy.
And all of that was happening in 2012, where the term really started to take off.
And only after this, in 2014, Solarpunk became this aesthetic we know today, when a (now defuct) tumblr blog started posting photos, artworks and other aesthetical things under the caption of Solarpunk. Especially as it was the first time the term was widely used within the Anglosphere.
Undoubtedly: This was probably how most people first learned of Solarpunk... But it was not how Solarpunk started. So, please stop spreading that myth.
The reason this bothers me so much is, that it so widely ignores how this movement definitely has its roots within Latin America and specifically Brazil. Instead this myth basically tries to claim Solarpunk as a thing that fully and completely originated within the anglosphere. Which is just is not.
And yes, there was artistic aspects to that early Solarpunk movement, too. But also a literary and political aspectt. That is not something that was put onto a term that was originally an aesthetic - but rather it was something that was there from the very beginning.
Again: There has been an artistic and aesthetic aspect in Solarpunk from the very beginning, yes. But there has been a literary and political aspect in it the entire time, too. And trying to divorce Solarpunk from those things is just wrong and also... kinda misses the point.
So, please. Just stop claiming that entire "it has been an aesthetic first" thing. Solarpunk is a genre of fiction, it is a political movement, just as much as it is an artistic movement. Always has been. And there has always been punk in it. So, please, stop acting as if Solarpunk is just "pretty artistic vibes". It is not.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, I guess.
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solacene · 4 months
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Beautiful artwork. I love architecture that incorporates many elements, here we can see water, greenery, air and stone. In the ideal world architecture will be more life giving to both those who occupy them and to the planet. credit Jacek Yerka
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Debbie Urbanski’s ‘After World’
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Debbie Urbanski's debut novel After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-World/Debbie-Urbanski/9781668023457
I first encountered Urbanski in "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried," an experimental short story on Motherboard's brilliant Terraform science fiction portal:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwvgeq/an-incomplete-timeline-of-what-we-tried
"Incomplete Timeline" is a list of climate remediation steps "working back from human extinction," like "increased military fortification of national, provincial, and state borders," "the founding of several utopias," and "redefine the word wilderness."
These items begin with a climax, or perhaps an anticlimax: "The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus."
This is the jumping off point for After World, which expands this final item to the action of a wrenching tale whose backstory is the list's remainder. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.
The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that scor8e.
And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.
But some people – young people – are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation.
Sen Anon is one of these observers, and her mothers take her to a remote cabin to live out (and observe) the last of humanity's days, ensuring she is settled in and then killing themselves. After all, without them, Sen Anon's limited food supply – meagerly supplemented by drones in proportion to the quality of the observations in her notebooks – will stretch further.
Much of the novel takes the form of Sen Anon's notebook observations, countersunk with an omniscient third-person narrator who is revealed to be [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, a software agent involved in the project to recreate all those dead humans in the Gaia metaverse.
[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very unreliable narrator, who reprograms itself through the course of the story, all the while muttering asides to itself about the theoretical basis for telling Sen's story this way. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc struggles with a supervisory AI that has been charged with overseeing all the [storyworkers], but which can't – or won't – rein in [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows more involved in Sen's life.
This experimental storytelling style (supplemented by found texts from humanity's dying, like a glossary of terms to be retired and new terms being created by a linguist who is starving to death as they complete their task) creates a contradictory narrative distance and closeness.
It's a curiously flawed omniscience that's allows Urbanski to capture the yawning, bottomless horror of the climate emergency of today and on the horizon. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of sustained, deepening existential dread that After World created, chapter by chapter.
To sharpen this, Sen's mothers – scientists who were given exceptions to the no-child policy because their work was deemed essential to the now-abandoned project of saving humanity – are grimly supportive of the mass suicide project. When Sen's own horror creeps up on her, her mothers are sharp and often unkind, with only the smallest flashes of love and sorrow for their daughter escaping their facades, all the more vivid for their rarity.
In contrast, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows ever more sympathetic to Sen and the rest of vanished humanity. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very convincing alien with motives and perspectives that are profoundly nonhuman, and yet, the compassion and love are unmistakable.
Of After World's two protagonists, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc might be the more relatable. It takes an alien point of view to truly see humanity's flawed glory, irredeemable and irreplaceable. If you reveled in the nonhuman umwelts on display in Laura Jean McKay's 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc will stretch your brain and imagination in similar ways:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/27/im-a-backdoor-man/#doolittle
After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/18/storyworker-ad39-393a-7fbc/#digital-human-archive-project
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justalittlesolarpunk · 6 months
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What I’ve been reading recently
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petrichorca · 7 months
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Stede and Ed hanging out in the snow on an ice ship. @y2jenn made this beautiful piece for @veeagainsttheday's and my post-apocalyptic ice piracy AU/climate change fic Runaway Effects. Go give Jenn some love because she's the best and I stare at this art all the time!! Also our fic is rated E for Explicit because, well, obviously they do more than just cuddle for warmth. ;)
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literary-illuminati · 3 months
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2024 Book Review #1 – How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
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I read the overwhelming majority of this book in 2023 but I finished it after new years so review #1 of the new year it is! Despite it by all accounts being very critically acclaimed and well-reviewed, I had absolutely never heard of it before opening up the packaging on a ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore was doing (incredible gimmick, for the record). Overall a great book, if rambling at points and with a somewhat weak and confused ending.
The story takes place in Kosawa, a village on the western periphery of a fictional west African country, with the incredible bad luck to have been built atop a fortune in oil. The story is told through several POVs, and follows the villagers struggle against the Pexton corporation and their country’s de facto neocolonial government to try and have their home restored to what it was before the river and soil were poisoned and children started dying. It’s told on a generational scale – stretching from the ‘80s to the mid 2000’s – and follows the main cast of characters from childhood into their forties, As might be expected from that, it’s not exactly fast-paced or full of heroics – lots of promises and reassurances being given and never lived up to, and dramatic actions being taken and leading to awful tragedies or only compromised half-successes. The book really beats in the theme that if you’re really powerless and the ones fucking you over have all the cards, a lot of time there really isn’t a winning move. Well, and maybe that the heroic, principled attempts at violent resistance repeatedly got everyone involved killed but did win real concessions and aid for the other villagers who were willing to play along (or just to sell out or give up Kosawa for dead), though I’m not entirely sure that’s how the story’s intended to be read.
The prose isn’t usually eye-catching, but it’s extremely well-constructed, and beautiful at points. The story does a lot with shifting points of view, jumping from a corporate one of a particular age-group of children whose lives parallel the story, and closely individual ones from different members of a particular family whose daughter Thula ends up becoming the moral/intellectual heart of the resistance. Each voice feels incredibly distinct and focused on very different things, in a way that really worked for me. The massive timeframe covered also lets the book really indulge in showing what the day to day life of the villagers looks like – how they sustain themselves, the social rhythms of life, the rituals of adulthood, marriage, and childbirth, how widows and children are treated, and how the poisoning of the environment around them weighs down but doesn’t destroy any of it. It even does a great job of really selling the perspective and world-views of people for whom the world is enchanted and spiritual rites have real direct physical effects, which in my experience the vast majority of books about religious/spiritual characters totally fail to.
The tone of things is pretty overwhelmingly melancholic – this is a story with a deep sense of history, which also means a very tragic imagination. Characters who really dedicate themselves to trying to change the world are portrayed as deeply admirable but almost certainly doomed and even likely to cause more harm than good. You see this most prominently with Thula, whose basically a genius and devotes her entire life from childhood to activism and social change with saintly (if not near-inhuman) purity and focus, and dies in her forties having not won much at all. The ones who take what they can, get government jobs and use the opportunity to become exactly as corrupt as the men who came before them and loot the country for the benefit of their friends and families meanwhile – well, they definitely aren’t making the world any better, but they’re shown as very human and sympathetic and they mostly end up with exactly the lives they were hoping for.
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elsolarpunk · 9 months
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Mezquitas solarpunks por Midjourney
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solarthropod · 8 months
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I both love and hate that Solarpunk is trending in the current times.
I hate it because it means we're past the time to give warning about the crisis. Cyberpunk and post-apo essentially failed as ''warning genres''. Ofc that's not all they are. I hate that we now have to face the current socio-climatological disaster.
But I love that we're gathering around this genre to imagine a cute cozy future. It feels so much better to share things based on hope, communities, and brighter times.
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thesolarpunkworkshop · 7 months
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youtube
I'm still amazed that nobody has heard of this project that tom hanks wrote and starred in. This is an early solarpunk web series that nobody remembers so now the whole thing is free on youtube.
As for why nobody has heard of it, well it was a project that was released in 2012 on yahoo videos. So that explains some things.
Its still pretty interesting.
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solarpunk-gnome · 1 year
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Seeds For the Swarm - A Review
Seeds for the Swarm by Sim Kern takes us on a journey of the near future where warming has continued and much of the United States is now barely habitable. #solarpunk #fiction #clifi #StelliformPress
Seeds for the Swarm by Sim Kern takes us on a journey of the near future where warming has continued and much of the United States is now barely habitable. People from the “Dust States” try to emigrate through a tightly-controlled border to the “Lush States” or muddle through with that rugged individualism we take so much pride in here in the United States. This feels like a very likely future…
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alpaca-clouds · 8 months
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An Overview Over the Solarpunk Anthologies
I thought, where I am already here, trying to get everyone to engage with Solarpunk as more than just an aesthetic and pretty flowers, I should give a quick overview over the Solarpunk antholigies, that have been released so far.
Note that so far most releases within the genre are in fact short stories. Though if anyone is interested, I can make a list of the novels I am aware of!
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Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World is pretty much how the genre got its start. The book was originally released in Brazil and only recently had been translated into the English language. It only covers a few stories, but those are a bit longer than your average short story to make up for it.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation has been quoted by many writers in the genre to have been a massive inspiration to them. The stories are very diverse and cover lots of ground.
Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology is probably the weirdest out of this bunch. While all of the other anthologies mostly focus on either SciFi settings or stories set in the here and now, Wings of Renewal mixes Solarpunk with Fantasy elements. At times those stories are SciFi, too, at times they are really mostly fantastical.
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Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers explores a wide variety of Solarpunk settings, some hopeful, some less optimistic. It is mostly set in warm and hot scenarios, though those can also vary quite a bit.
Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters then went ahead as a "sequel" of sorts to explore the concept of Solarpunk in colder climates.
Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures has probably to be my favorite one from the anthologies edited by Sarena Udaberri. It explores how humans and animals can live together in Urban settings. And once again, the stories vary from those set in a more futuristic and a more present setting a lot.
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Fighting for the Future is the most recent of those anthologies, as it has only released last month. (And yes, this also means: I have not yet read it at all.) It features stories of Cyberpunk and Solarpunk futures - as well as stories where both intertwine!
Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology is exactly what it says on the cover. An anthology featuring Lunarpunk stories. So Solarpunk with a bit more mysticism to go with it. And as this also only has released earlier this year I admittedly also have not gotten around to reading it yet.
This does remind me though: Would anyone be interested in me writing mini reviews to the stories in those anthologies?
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kirstywoolven · 8 months
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So I'm mulling over an idea rn... Anyone got any clifi (climate fiction) recommendations?
My preferred media would be books or podcasts (but I'm still happy for recommendations for other media!)
(forgot to mention this on the twitter post, but especially if ...water-based climate events feature)
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#1 fiction bestseller!
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justalittlesolarpunk · 9 months
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Solarpunk Sunday Suggestion:
Read some Ursula K. Le Guin
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andfaun · 2 years
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baelpenrose · 10 months
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Arcadian Inquisition: Special Thanks
I want to say a special thanks to everyone for your readership of this series for the last 4 years. Some of you have followed the story of Ash and River from the very beginning, some of you joined much more recently, but to everyone who joined on this journey, I do want to say, genuinely, thank you. It's been four years, on and off. So much has changed in my life. I mean...almost everything has changed. To give you some concept. When I started this story, I was almost done with my Bachelor's Degree in History, and living in northern Humboldt, the land of forests that inspired the world of Arcadia. Fast forward - I finished my Bachelor's, started and finished my MA, started and finished my teaching credential, moved four times... I met and became mentor to several amazing young people, most notably the hyperactive and passionate @quantumized-insanity and the brilliant, artistic, and empathic @writing-with-olive. You guys are the River to my Ash - warming my emotionally repressed heart and constantly driving me to be better. I also want to thank the eternally brilliant and empathic @canyouhearthelight for all her hard work in beta reading. Without her hard work, and her help, this could not have been half as good as it was. Thank you so much, friend, for both this and everything else. I also want to thank my partner, @fuschiaghosts, for all the snuggles and cuddles she has offered as this was being written. Like many who tried to get into the series, the angst was not for her, but she was supportive of the endeavor nonetheless, and she has made my life infinitely better by being in it. I would also like to thank @lavcircuts for her work in the Root Confederacy. I look forward to what you create, friend. Also @steelbladessong, for your theorycrafting, @1978sah and @angel113 for your comments. Also holy FUCK I cannot forget @generalperfectionbread for the absolute FEAT of beating the previous speed-reading record after joining 120 chapters in and reading the entire thing in a week - or Angel113 of topping that at the same pace starting from chapter 137. Gaia. Damn. Also to @dierotenixe for your reblogs every week, and to everyone else who has participated in this story, through art, comments, likes, and reblogs. Oh and whoever submitted the ship list - I never caught you but your humor is top tier. I also want to thank someone else whose impact on my life and writing is profound. I have no idea how that story will end, but I hope you're okay. I don't regret meeting you, and I still care. If you're reading this, you know who you are. Finally, I need to dedicate this story threefold: First, to the Earth we live on and the importance of restoring balance to nature and living in harmony with it. We cannot continue living separately from nature or we will die. Second, I would like to dedicate this book series to the indigenous people of the world and acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of it was written whilst I was living on unceded Wiyot land, with a good chunk of Journeyer written while I was living on unceded Mechoopda territory instead. And like a small fraction of Apprentice towards the tail end of that book written in Chuckchansi territory, actually. (Like I said I moved around a lot while writing this) We can and should return land to those who rightfully hold sovereignty over it. Finally, I would like to dedicate this to those who find family in unconventional places and the idea that love in all forms conquers everything, that all of us are worthy of it. If you are reading this, somewhere, you have family/tribe and someone does or will care about you.
Baelpenrose
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