Solarpunk Blues

[mtvessel]

Mar 2022
Sunvault - Ed. Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland – Upper Rubber Band Books, 2017
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If science fiction has a problem, it is that it tends to the downbeat. While novels with utopian backgrounds are not unknown (Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series comes immediately to mind), it must be said that the majority of societies depicted in recent SF are not ones in which any rational person would actually want to live. In the past few years there has also been a rush from reality, with many writers preferring to explore what are in effect fantasy settings with technological trappings rather than the classic SF approach of worldbuilding based on plausible or satirical extrapolations of current trends. Both of these developments most likely derive from a single common cause – the progressive loss of faith in a positive future for humanity due to seemingly intractable problems such as global warming, environmental degradation, and political and social injustice, that has been an ongoing trend of my adult life.

Trends, however, beget reactions, and one such has been the rise of solarpunk, a literary and artistic subgenre that seeks to depict societies where humanity has solved, or at least learnt to live with, the very serious problems that we currently face. So what I hoped to get from this solarpunk collection was some SF stories with plausible backgrounds but an optimistic tone. Sadly, with some exceptions, that's not how they came across.

The story that came closest to what I was after was T.X. Watson's The Boston Hearth Project, in which a group of hackers subvert a newly-built closed-ecosystem tower block intended to allow the super-rich to live without having to interact with the rest of the city and its problems. The story is ingeniously told as the transcript of a job interview with one of the hackers in which they give it as an example of when they worked well in a team. It is heavily cyberpunk-influenced but much more upbeat in its outcome. I also enjoyed Speechless Love by Yilun Fan for its deft depiction of a stratospherian society of floating hoverships created after earth's surface becomes uninhabitable, and for the cultural specificity of its story, in which an engineer starts a relationship with a neighbour over a shared love of Chinese poetry. You and Me and the Deep Dark Sea by Jess Barber has a much more downbeat setting, a community living in a largely abandoned town that is threatened by rapidly rising sea levels and pollution, but is redeemed by a sweet and unexpected relationship.

The other stories were all competently written, but either failed to fulfil the upbeat brief or just weren't particularly memorable or compelling. There were a number of repeating themes; ecology projects (Teratology, The Desert, Blooming, Thirstlands, A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World), symbiosis or bodily transformation (The Death of Pax, Solar Child, The Trees Between), and teachers educating children after eco-collapse (Eight Cities, Last Chance). Other stories were just depressing (Boltzmann Brain, The Road to the Sea). Several had a strong fantasy element - Dust purported to be a hard-nosed science fiction thriller but veered into nonsense at the end, while The Reset is an interesting but implausible thought experiment in how eco-catastrophe could be averted with time travel. I would have liked more grounded stories like Pop and the CFT which investigated the implications of a Carbon Footprint Tax paid as death duties, although that one didn't work for me due to the obscure musical references.

There were also a number of line drawings, which did not come across well when viewed on a e-reader (though do try a Google Search for some fabulous solarpunk images), and poems, none of which I remember. However, this does indicate the great strength of this collection, which is its diversity in both form and cultural influences. All but one of the authors were new to me and several are clearly just starting out on their SF career. Most of the stories here still hew rather too closely to the downbeat cyberpunk and eco-catastrophe tropes of the last few years, but I suppose you've got to start somewhere.

Comments

Hi^^

[sennashi_dorei]

I would love to hear an album called SolarPunk Blues.

As a young person in school, it was taught to me that a good thing to do, is to write in such a way, that you are not the focus of the writing. Oh, you've done it?

My L2 became a means of trying to do that, sometimes.

All things are random, and where is the 意味 in anything? Meaning where it looks like the flavor of the sound of the heart.