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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

What is a solar punk book to recommend?

Solarpunk doesn't really do stories compared to other "-punks". Optimism doesn't provide compelling conflicts. "Nausiccaä of the Valley of the Wind" is "Post apocalyptic" solarpunk manga (and an old one at that).

https://best-sci-fi-books.com/16-best-solarpunk-books/ seems reasonable.

Reading a book on permaculture seems the most solarpunk "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual"by Bill Mollison stands out there.

Definitely not "solarpunk" in the strictest sense but Star Trek - The Next Generation does depict many ideals of solarpunk. Sometimes directly, but often indirectly too (like scenes at Starfleet Academy).

One of the reasons I really enjoy Star Trek TNG is that it has that optimistic of the future vs many of the other Sci-Fi shows that often focus on a more dystopian universe (even if they're not strictly "cyberpunk").

There haven't really been many other shows I can think of that have the same tone as TNG. Definitely The Orville; but that's to be expected as it's pretty much a love letter to Star Trek.

I would add Station Eleven to this adjacency list

>"Nausiccaä of the Valley of the Wind" is "Post apocalyptic" solarpunk manga (and an old one at that).

By that same token, I think I heard LoZ: Breath of the Wild described as post-apocalyptic solarpunk once

Maybe I am totally mis-categorizing here, but I would say that Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution" is solarpunk in spirit if not in fact. It has a similar techno-optimism with a radical non-violent revolution as it's stated goal.

> Fuller advocated the design science revolution as an alternative to politics, seeking to optimize planetary resources for the benefit of 100% of humanity. He coined the term synergetics to explain how design science could create rich returns, such as how "energy income" could be harvested from the environment. His main premise was that nature's existing and omnipotent order must be allowed to guide human designs, if they are to survive and thrive as a species. He wrote that humanity was approaching its critical test as a species, in which it would be determined whether or not man was a mistake of nature, or its greatest accomplishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science_revolution

There's no one book, but his "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" might be a place to start if you're interested.

> The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. Noting the lack of any user manual to help Earthians steward this ship, Fuller offers some reflections, prognostications, and guidance, based on contemporary concepts of linked relationships, that may help in the understanding, management, preservation, and sustainment of this ship. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...

Love it: Solar punk is fundamentally nonfiction. Now that’s an optimistic storyline with enough tension to make it readable.

I think it's like making up an alternate future but one that is feasible to reach (as opposed to e.g. Star Trek) or in other words, it's very-near-future hard sci-fi imagining a world that would be fun to live in and then trying to make it a reality. And why not? Aren't we living in a post-historical age? I think the development of quasi-arbitrary niches or fandoms where people make up a fantasy world and live there makes sense. Lifestyle as art. We're presumably free of the strictures and limits that plagued pre-scientific societies, our technology has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, it may not be evenly distributed yet but the future is here.

If you can make your art/life self-sustainable (and you're not hurting anyone) so much the better. Life, rather than imitating art, becomes it. I'm thinking of the Hundred Rabbits folks ( https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/hundred_rabbits.html ), or the hand-made sail-powered Ceiba schooner under construction now in Costa Rica ( https://www.sailcargo.inc/ ) and already under contract to deliver sustainably grown coffee to Canada next year.

B. Fuller is a legend and revolutionary in a lot of ways. Have you read any Sloterdijk? He takes a lot of his ideas on and applies them more strictly to philosophy.

I haven't read him, I'm not much for philosophy I'm sorry to admit.

Fair enough!

Usually, solar"punk" has zero amounts of punk in it, so you won't find books similar to what other -punk have done. As they state:

> At its core, solarpunk is the ecological antidote to cyberpunk.

I really wish the people behind this aesthetic would move to a name better reflecting their aspirations. Solar-nouveau, solar utopia, whatever.

Solarpunk has pretty strong anti-capitalist leanings. It doesn't have the punk element of being "low-life" like cyberpunk is, but the commonality between the two genres is that cyberpunk imagines the world that unlimited corporate power would create (from an 80s perspective, hence the neon and ascendant Japanese themes), and solarpunk imagines a world where the negative side-effects of capitalism (exploitation, alienation, environmental damage etc) are mitigated. It's like the optimistic mirror image to cyberpunk.

Arguably, if it's optimistic, it isn't "punk." That "low-life" alienation and rage against the system is what makes it punk - the "cyber" part is just aesthetic.

Anticapitalism isn't punk in a world where the anticapitalists win.

solarphunk

This is just my headcanon but I think of the punk in solarpunk as being metatextual: it's not rebelling against its own world, it's rebelling against ours, and against the pervasive pessimism of capitalist realism. I think we need something like that in a time where most fictional futures are dystopian.

Cyberpunk is nothing if not a rebellion against our own world and status quo. Liberal governments are put under the thumb of for-profit corporations, which continue to develop and unleash new technologies on the public without any thought given to the social consequences or any check from the government. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology empowers authoritarian governments and those who rebel are pushed into the sidelines to become social outcasts. Cyberpunk asks us to consider what happens if social development doesn't keep pace with technological development sprinting forward at breakneck speed. Believing social development will keep pace with technology is the essence of solarpunk. Solarpunk is a lullaby.

Solarpunk isn't about believing that social development will keep pace with technological development, it's about imagining what would happen if it did. Its politics are not a fairytale but a call to action to divert course. Cyberpunk says "the future is just gonna be awful" and explores just how awful it's going to be (which isn't rebellion, it's apathy), solarpunk says "imagine what the future could be like if we made it better". It's only a lullaby if you believe there's no hope for change.

Cyberpunk is a call to action: seek social reform before this happens. Solarpunk is the opposite, Solarpunk encourages people to believe that everything will turn out well in the end after green technology saves us from our past follies.

They're both calls to action: avoid cyberpunk, seek solarpunk. We've gotten so much "avoid this" fiction in the past decades that people are just burnt out and actual visions of a positive future have been largely absent since Star Trek, so it makes sense to say "hey, you know all these abstract political ideas that we talk about? this is what the world might look like if we implemented them". Nothing about solarpunk says that it is the default outcome. No reasonable person thinks that it is. It's an ideal to fight for.

The era of collapse fiction like cyberpunk has only really given rise to one political movement: accelerationism. Whose defining trait is "if the world's going to collapse, we should probably hurry it along so we can see if there's anything to salvage afterwards".

Absolutely. Having an ideal to fight for and a vision of a better future are both necessary to move beyond the current system.

> The era of collapse fiction like cyberpunk

Punk was never about collapse, you're confusing that with post-apo.

Also I'm unconvinced about the political potential of solar utopias: they're usually centered on art, and completely avoid the how. So many of them draw nice-looking landscapes that make no sense: glass and steel have to come from somewhere, urban centers can't exist without a periphery, etc. All the issues are carefully avoided and labeled as "negative thinking, which [authors] rebel against".

Totally disagree. Solarpunk is providing an out for the future that cyberpunk warns us about. Hoplessness is endemic amongst the young people in Western socities at the moment. A hopeful vision for the future is something necessary to pervade the public consciousness and create a better future in reality. It honestly happened with cyberpunk already. The aesthetic was taken up subconsciously by designers and engineers and actualised into reality. The same could happen for solarpunk.

A recurring thing in punk/cyberpunk culture is that the existing system is overbearing, and can't be removed. So the punk elements live in the shadow of that system, and thrive in the cracks, the neglected parts. That's usually why (cyber)punk characters are bottom feeders that do stuff that is either not well known, not profitable, or too risky.

Solarpunk usually describe societies where the negative aspects have just disapeared, and been replaced by stuff that the genre proponents enjoy. From what I read, the claim is that the "punk" aspect is the rebellion against negativity. But that's not something we can see in their production.

It seems to me, or I imagine that the solarpunk vision just breads authoritarianism out of its design..

> there’s a -punk there, and not just because it’s become a trendy suffix. There’s an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it’s an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance.”

> Green, sustainable infrastructure as a form of resistance. Technical systems decoupled from the ‘authoritarian technics’ that Mumford warns us about. The embracing of the natural and the technical. This idea is where the solarpunk vision really comes into its own.

Seems to be mentioned in the article why there's a punk suffix. I think it fits. This kind of thinking is inherently subversive to the power structures in place in our societies today.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is pretty good if quite preachy.

It shows how bleak things have gotten that a book about surviving the coming climate crisis seems fantastical.

The Mars trilogy from the same author is also a good recommendation. Hmm, probably his whole bibliography. Lots of solarpunk elements.

Kim's a dude. Not a big deal. Just thought you'd like to know.

I didn't like the detective-ish novel set in NYC after the climate change crisis but if I'd lived an appreciable time there I might have.

Haha, I just noticed, I got him mixed with another author!

I couldn’t get past the middle. It dragged.

Does it get into the solar tech punkd quasioptimism by the end?

Oh lord does it drag, but yes by the end it's socialism and dirigibles for all.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow has imo solarpunk elements, but isn’t entirely that.

There are aspects to Iain M Banks' "Culture" novels that might qualify.

Solarpunk only really got started in the last years of Iain Banks' life, and is generally set closer to the near future. I can't really think of much in the way of ecological themes in the Culture novels, and all the special effects in them are powered by antimatter and the "energy grid" between different unverses rather than solar power.

Sure - I meant more "in the spirit of...", re: fundamentally optimistic premises.

Becky Chambers’ name gets tossed about, but I can’t recommend anything in particular.

The Ministry for the Future

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