Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards a Solarpunk Future
thedorkweb.substack.com
thedorkweb.substack.com
punk isn't nihilistic lamentation, it's nihilistic resistance. it's punk to fight. it's building anything from nothing, because there is nothing to lose. punk cultures appear within dystopia as an alternative, punk aesthetic is amateur and diy-accessible, and punk attitudes are critical and creative.
we have enough dystopic warnings. everyone knows where we're headed. alienation and addiction are here, at the beginning of the plot. now we have the conflict, the departure from weakness, and eventually a resolution. solarpunk aesthetically charts a clear course through the narrative arc, it is mid-plot resourceful strength and a possible budding victory beyond the climax of struggle.
Punk is not about where you are going, is not about what will become. Punk is about doing it regardless of that and what others expect you to. A solarpunk is certainly hopeful that actions will lead to a better reality, but they are more focused on action today than what will be of tomorrow.
A solarpunk is a punk because, unlike other more mainstream ecologist they don't need to convince others of their view to act. They just act.
>The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly "speaking computer."
>THEREFORE, if you thought that punks on motorcycles were a problem, just wait until you meet the -- the -- You know, there isn't a good word to describe them?
>So I set out to create and define that word.
It's interesting that you framed things through the concept of a narrative arc because that's exactly how I pictured it when I wrote my piece. I wonder if it's because as humans, both individually and within the context of society as a whole, it's important for us to have a sense of direction / purpose when carrying out action.
[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/possibility-adversity-hope-fa...
I have lately come to accept that the book had a huge influence on me; it just keeps coming up in conversation. Well... I bring it up, because it struck a chord, and because it fits well with the conversations I have.
But the writing is so.... aaaargh, so shoddy at times. And half of the book is just a brain dump of ideas and projections of current trends in the future, but it's just not presented as a good plot line. It's very clear that the intention is to wrap some (powerful) ideas into a plot to make it digestible, but it's just not that well executed.
But as I said, I made my peace with this love-hate relationship I have with the book. I just hope there will be more, better solarpunk art. Something I can actually recommend to friends without it feeling like homework.
I think there is a lot of value in the ideas there, we desperately need them, and they are very clearly formulated. Just a bit^Wlot too clearly. He should have chosen a different format, although I can't really think of a good one either. World building needs plot to give it any credibility, and tee point was to give these ideas exactly that.
So I don't want to trash talk Doctorowh in general here.
Doctorow has added more to my life than the whole of New Yorker, and I'm grateful.
People can criticize without providing a solution.
Walkaway was way better than most of it and as you said the writing is, pretty awkward at times. But some of the ideas (reclaiming and rebuilding bad areas, sharing how to do brain uploads) were evocative enough to stick with me. That being said DM me if you ever run a bookclub on it
Also avoid Radicalized it's the worst part of Walkaway
Agreed, would love to hear about a bookclub if someone were to do it.
I agree. I was intrigued by the genre and picked up what happens to be the only books mentioned in the article by name: The Dispossessed and Sunvault.
They're both fairly boring. Slow paced, lack of nail-biting moments, some stories from Sunvault completely went over my head (barely understood anything from them)...
I have respect for Doctorow from an advocacy perspective, but I'm not a fan of his fiction at all.
Her parents were anthropologists and she herself was politically engaged, so much of her work deals with themes of culture, the relationship between culture and technology, cultural supremacy, gender, and power in general. Much of her work inverts the racial and gender order of traditional scifi.
"The Rule of Names" is another short story in that anthology that I loved -- this one was less political in nature, and introduces her Earthsea universe. It's fairly easy to find a PDF copy of this one on the internet.
As far as her novels go, "A Wizard of Earthsea" might be the best starter novel if you're interested in giving her novels another shot.
IMO this quote from it captures the essence of her writing (and the experience of reading it) pretty well:
“You want to work spells,' Ogion said presently, striding along. 'You've drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?'
'Strawflower.'
'And that?'
'I don't know.'
'Fourfoil, they call it.' Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, 'What is its use, Master?'
'None I know of.'
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.
'When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind%27s_Twelve_Quarters
And I don't agree with their hijacking of the word punk. I'm no punk but from what I've seen they aren't short on empathy.
Yeah I just don't find that to be very "punk." In cyberpunk, we have drug-addicted hackers, alienated from society. "Solarpunk," to me, sounds pretty wholesome and very much in line with the direction that society wants to go.
And the curious thing is that being "wholesome" - at least in the 1950s kind of way - is just the narrative that the addicted acquisitive narcissists of today appeal to.
Topsy turvy times indeed.
Business and museums are shutting down for good.
Cities are emptying out.
Hugging another human has been demonized and is considered irresponsible.
People are getting fined for not wearing facial coverings.
Our way of life has been completely hijacked by fear.
Things are very unstable and then we have an election.
OTOH, if you're not in one of one categories you have very little to worry about.
We were at this before with both cyberprep and steampunk too in different ways. Cyberprep was more "work inside the system" and "technology has potential for good" and rebellion against tired old luddite science fiction 20th century tropes of fear and panic against science and technology. Steampunk is fundamentally dated such that its progressive or radical ideas and aesthetics as very old hat, its past traditional ways laughably obsolete. How much of the usual era suspect's past (Usually Victorian but one could on a trchnicality put in Bronze Age Hero punk as it is only an incorrect descriptor by convention) and old mores are included or not and how praised, condemned, or simply presented how it "was" unflinchingly.
Or at least, he direction that society should want to go.
I don't see that much conscience about climate change, renewables, energetic sustainability, resource depletion, etc, around me.
I'm not sure if you're paying attention, but current society wants capitalism and consumption until the earth has been pillaged. For instance, Joe Biden said no fracking after 2050. That's 30 years from now.
Or maybe, in such a case, the people who have actually been consuming (and emitting) like there is no tomorrow all these decades should make substantial adjustments to their lifestyle (i.e. pay more taxes), so that the people who have been consuming nothing can eat. Sounds a bit more reasonable to me. And we are not talking about a few people, especially if you are referring to the whole world.
Actually, for a brief moment I thought you were joking.
Well, being as how there's 0% probability of us ending fossil fuel usage in that time, I guess we'll put your prediction to the test. Personally, I don't see it happening...
I don't think that is a difference on solarpunk's part though. One thing that became more and more explicit with cyberpunk was that the "independence from society" was fundamentally a lie the "fringer" told themself because they broke into offices and factories for money instead of working in them and obeyed laws only when the barrel of a gun was staring them down but fundamentally they were just as much as an interchangeable cog as everybody else. Getting over that delusion could be considered a painful step forward as they need either steps towards truer independence or move to try to change what they don't like about society. They don't have to be subservient proles by any means but well the first step to solving a problem is recognition.
Solarpunk, like all the other ___punks, is just another Thing that people like. This is why you sometimes hear authors dump on "genre fiction," because making aesthetics the guiding star of a story doesn't usually make for compelling fiction.
As far as social commentary, why do we have to name everything - what if instead of a "Solarpunk Future" it was just...the future? Branding something has an interesting effect: it turns it into a fandom. Branding draws borders. It turns ideas into a tribe, and makes in-groups and out-groups of us all. Now instead of discussing specific solutions for our very real, very big problems, we descend into discussions of what is or is not solarpunk, or cyberpunk, or the relative merits of each.
Let's stop branding everything and just talk about real problems and real solutions, not which literary or artistic aesthetic is the best "path forward."
'in-groups and out-groups' and division can result from this but doesn't have to, it's not a given. Like a lot of philosophies, gate keeping via some kind of strict rules/definition I've found is usually (not always) done for other reasons by self proclaimed leaders. Being inclusive, from a community stand point, commonly is pushed aside by those that want to min/max some profitable (monetary, power, influence etc) aspect of that community causing said division. So while it might not need a name, a narrative around those ideas with a name does improve the ability to spread those values, 'solarpunk' being a brand isn't inherently bad.
We do have "very real, very big problems", ones that will need an almost unthinkable amount of cooperation to resolve. These aren't purely tech problems, these are largely social problems, and narrative/branding is immensely powerful in that sense. And all these possible solutions (technical or otherwise) are individually only going to solve small parts, slowly but surely as people work extremely hard on all these very real and hard problems, we move towards a new 'normal' without those problems, but during that long long time without those touch stones of values as reminders of _why_, it is very easy to lose focus. Narrative and branding can help solidify those ideas.
It's kind of funny in a sad way that some of the biggest companies in the world are advertising companies but when those same techniques are even slightly used and not rammed down our throats we pick up on those methods and say they are not needed. To solve those very real, very big problems, I'd say we should use everything we can to move the needle in positive direction and that 'branding', in that sense, is needed to drive the level of cooperation to address them. Maybe not the branding of 'solarpunk' but if that resonates with people, I'm all for it.
Maybe that would be good. At least to go more in a SolarPunk than CyberPunk direction.
I was into CyberPunk in the 90s. I always wondered what came after it in science fiction. I mostly stopped reading novels so I don't really know.
What is the actual normal common flavor of science fiction today? Or flavors.
I guess I did read one or two Singularity genre books and also Altered Carbon which is CyberPunk.
What section does Ramez Naam go under?
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.
The point of the -punk label is that actively working towards a solarpunk world is pretty much punk because it's not where the powers in society want to go. E.g. a lot of it has an anarchist tendency because of self-reliance and independence ideas, it emphasizes slow down/simplicity vs corporate green high-tech projects, ...
The cliche solarpunk story is IMHO more "groups of people that break out in small eco-friendly communities" than "Singapore with more green".
Slow-down/anti-auth is primitivism (think: subsistence farming, no computers, ... ).
Cyberpunk is definitely accelerate/auth (like it or not but we seem to be heading into this direction).
For you, growing up there and then. For us in the US in the 80s, it was similar. But both showed other cultures it was ok to say No to growing up to be part of the machine your parents accepted. And it is just as much punk to now give you the finger as it was when we did too. No one owns it and trying to do so is very much gatekeeping and Not Punk.
Do I want to puke when some teenager wears a Dead Kennedys shirt they bought at Hot Topic? Sure. But it may be they’re a better person than me, kinder or nicer or harder or whatever. Let them be punks too. Because god knows we need them.
Los Saicos would disagree[1] ;) Punk means different things to different people. Lets not get hung up on it.