I have read all the major solarpunk anthologies that have come out in the last five years. If we focus primarily on the genre’s textual artifacts - including the discourses on the various social media platforms, but especially the genre fiction it produces - solarpunk’s better qualities become unimpeachable. I told him afterwards that it sounded like solarpunk, and he stage-whispered, “That’s because it is.” Stories where sacrifices are made, but in the end, we find ways to survive and become wise. However, at Boskone 57, one of the largest science fiction conventions in the country, where he was guest of honor, Robinson described a genre full of futures to defy the Anthropocene. He takes issue with the viral over-affixation of “-punk” (Google punk genres and see how many you get). In many ways, it can be more rigorous than so-called “hard science fiction.” Don’t the messenger I’m quoting Kim Stanley Robinson, author of New York 2140 among many other groundbreaking stories of eco-fiction. The primary colors of its aura are red, orange, and yellow: Courageously compassionate, creatively scientific, and awakened interdependence. And to be fair, it is impossible to dream of Hell and not pine for its opposite. So after decades of imagineering and community building, there are bound to be layers and crumbly edges. Thus, the movement was growing long before the term was coined in 2008. Le Guin helped plant solarpunk seeds decades ago, in stories such as the 1972 novel The Dispossessed, her 1982 essay “ A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be ,” and many othe r Daoist-inspired works. The solarpunk aesthetic will sometimes wear utopian clothing, but it’s nobody’s fault, really. It’s true that the Google replicator machine will serve up a visual feast of enforested skyscrapers and lush solar energy mushroom cities (possibly under the sea, possibly shared with amiable, buck-toothed invertebrates with ageless comedic timing). Detractors label it a kind of Pollyanna utopianism full of empty calories. Solarpunk is the environmentally conscious speculative arts movement that best navigates the terrors ahead. I ordered the exact opposite of this nightmare. ” Oh yes, and California actually is burning right now. Parable of the Sower is set somewhere in the 2020s during a presidential election in which the candidate’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again. Not only is this specific dystopia possible, Butler seems to have predicted it twenty-seven years ago. Will this be the season my melanin hard-fails me? Is this the season when my Westworld kingdom is invaded by drought and famine? When Russia’s permafrost melts, releasing primeval microscopic disease-titans ( they are real, 2017 ) to gobble me up in a surprise Greek tragedy? When the floodgates of my Amazon-fueled desires are permanently clogged by natural man-made disaster? Of course, Prime will continue to deliver, but the markup would be understandably obscene. Yet despite the allure of two months of do-whatever-I-want-time, more and more I dread the coming of summer, because glaciers the size of islands are falling into the ocean. My day job is teaching elementary school. ]įast forward to our present non-fiction. We will die of consumption after a fifty-plus year bender, drunk on neoliberal, late-stage capitalist moonshine. I’m talking, dolphins Snapchatting us, “WE OUT! NO-THANKS-FOR-THE-MERCURY-MARINATED-FISH!”-type of climatic environmental and societal collapse. In her fictional near-future, Southern California will become but one of the newly red-lined regions earmarked for a corner pocket of Hell, because the end is nigh. Jemisin, published the novel Parable of the Sower in 1993, first of a trilogy. Octavia Butler, the Black science fiction author to whom all others were compared until the coming of N.K.
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