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Solarpunk Blues
Sep. 20th, 2022 07:19 pmMar 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.
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