Solarpunk Reflections

A few weeks ago, I published an article on our literary collective's site with some opinions on Grist's Imagine 2200 Top 12 stories. For those who don't know what that is, it's the biggest/most popular contest for solarpunk and climate fiction stories, with more than 1200 submissions each year.

As such, I expected to read the best authors of the genre grappling with the themes that are key to solarpunk. In this post I try to give a brief overview of each story (with a summary and a personal opinion, so that you can contradict me if I got something wrong!), explain what felt missing, and why I think we need solarpunk authors to try harder and push the boundaries of what we can collectively imagine.

EDIT: After a discussion with Susan Kaye Quinn I want to stress that the intention of this article is NOT to gatekeep solarpunk and try to draw a line between what SHOULD and SHOULDN'T be. After all, there is no big-S Solarpunk that I or Grist or anyone else is a paragon of; Grist's stories explore some angles better than others, and my message is meant for writers of other angles (not only the tech but also the anticapitalism and the collective action ones, and so on) that they're needed just as much.

NOTE: Each Summary section contains SPOILERS, so come here after you've read the anthology yourself if you don't want surprises. Alternatively, send me a DM with instructions to put spoilers on markdown (I have tried a few but none worked).

12 – We Cast Our Eyes to the Unknowable Now

Summary: The MC comes back home from her job at the fast food in a neighborhood where some unspecified disaster left a chasm decades ago and was never repaired. She can’t find her little sister, so she starts looking for her; climbs up to the top of their apartment complex where there’s a rooftop garden. From there, she spots her sister in the chasm. She goes down the chasm and her sister is tending to some native plants. Then they go home together.

Personal opinion: It felt very shallow. It’s very expositive, the solarpunk stuff is just dropped here and there, in handwaved descriptions or characters explaining them flatly to the reader. The little sister has asthma, but it doesn’t matter. The chasm has been there for decades, yet nobody has attempted to repair it. I expected it to be the main element around which the story revolved, but it turned out to be just a static background.

11 – To Rescue a Self

Summary: A climate journalist returns to Lagos after her investigation on a Big Oil project went south. It’s the year 2100 and the city has changed a lot, but she manages to meet her friends (who all work in climate law and ecocide jurisdiction). They try to cheer her up and talk about their project to mix some innovation with tradition. Then she visits a natural reserve, where she chats with some locals and gets a story on how OGM seeds work along native plants. She heads back home and helps her bulimic friend after an episode, she tells him she’s always felt like a failure and they promise each other to get better.

Personal opinion: I can see there was more thought behind this, but it still felt quite disconnected; the hefty length didn’t help. There is nothing very speculative or rooted in future (investigating Big Oil in 2100? Saro Wiwa died in 1995), her highly specialized friends were mostly just chatting and the technology wasn't very imaginative overall. I liked the Nigerian accents in the dialogues, but I expected more from a Nigerian author.

10 – This View From Here

Summary: The MC has fought with her dad and she's now hiding at her grandma's place. Later in the night she bikes home, and in the morning she chats with her dad in front of a coffee, and he cries because he realizes he's putting on her parts of his trauma from the dead mom/wife, and he's afraid of her getting hit by climate disasters. It ends with the MC leaving for the city.

Personal opinion: There are some great dialogues, but this did not feel solarpunk at all. There’s barely any technology involved (the bike was electric!), the climate disasters are all hypothetical or faraway and it’s a very simple family drama that could’ve been set in early 2000s if not for a quick VR mention.

9 – The Ones Left Behind

Summary: The MC owns a silkworm restaurant in PuertoChina, which she inherited from her grandma. The silkworm food provider informs her of an issue with the water harvesting system and that the trees are thirsty. They contact the appointed official and she explains it's just a clogged pipe, nothing major. They find the worker and help him unclog the pipes. The storm comes, but it doesn't damage anything. They head back to the restaurant, where they eat some silkworms. Her friend tells her how all the rich people in New York have left, and they are the ones left behind. She takes him to the silkworm greenhouse and they exchange a kiss.

Personal opinion: The beginning made me think of another family drama with the MC mourning the dead grandma, but I was pleased that the author tried to set up an infrastructural problem. Sadly it wasn't very convincing (a rich-less New York can't repair pipes?) and a problem from the 19th century, rather than 23rd. Well written with fantastic culinary descriptions and smooth dialogues; the title is barely relevant to the story, and the romantic ending was not necessary in my opinion.

8 – The Isle of Beautiful Waters

Summary: A family of Guadeloupean shepherds deals with drought. The MC is taken by his parents to the hidden source where there's still water. After that, they tell legends on the origins of Guadeloupe with the sisters. A notifications informs them that a hurricane is on its way; together they look for their mother but can't find her. The hurricane arrives and the narration becomes mythological, mixing with the legends told by the daughters.

Personal opinion: It was one of the hardest stories to read; there are many Caribbean terms that I couldn't find on the internet, and the accents made the dialogues quite challenging. The prose is very repetitive, most events are lists of actions and I did not understand the chapter division. The ending was cryptic and left me quite unsatisfied.

7 – Tangles in the Weave

Summary: The MC is waiting for a metamorphosis to happen and is very anxious. Other characters who have undergone the metamorphosis (her father, her friends, etc.) give her advice on how to deal with it. Others have different “souls” (monkeys, wolves, octopuses), but she knows she has a blue butterfly, which has gone extinct 200 years prior. She dreams of being a butterfly reincarnating against her will in a person's body. She heads to the House of Butterflies where a woman explains the visions. In another dream, she sees her own city in the future and talks to her inner butterfly. Then she wakes up 10 days later and picks up several new hobbies, finds a boyfriend and kisses him.

Personal opinion: Very dreamlike and personal story. There might have been a gender allegory, but it was either very shallow or I did not catch it. It felt like closer to fantasy, and the solarpunk elements were too few to justify its presence in this ranking.

6 – Plantains in Heaven

Summary: Set in a partially flooded London, the MCs move around in rowboats to take materials from one side of the city to the next. One of the MCs' grandmas is struggling, and she is the designed rower to visit the local church. One of the characters asks for green banana seeds, a plant tied to their Nigerian heritage, to make the grandma happy. The MC accepts, on the condition that he can help raising the plants correctly. Months later, they begin planting the green bananas in rundown and submerged buildings. Safety inspectors are about to find them out, but the MCs manage to escape. The building is declared too risky, but they decide to keep growing the bananas there.

Personal opinion: I found the prose quite challenging, the events trivial and the repeated flashbacks kept interrupting the dialogues; I found it hard to read this story to the end. The MC is often infantilized and this did not help the immersion. I appreciate the attempt to show different kinds of economic relationships between characters and institutions. The second-to-last scene should've been tense, but I felt no urgency at all.

5 – Our Continuity, Each of Us Raindrops

Summary: The MCs wait for a football match to end: one of the players has to hand him a turtle. One of the two is a drone. There's a second drone that seeds clouds, according the a program that's been going on for 320 years and creates a constant rainfall over the whole state of New York. The MC's brother is in Florida, bedridden with a rare disease; the drone serves as his eyes and ears. The two are on the road to recover as many endangered species as possible. The three get to a beach, still chasing the rain-drone, and meet the player's brother who warns them about authorities on their way to catch the brother-drone. He tells the brother to move forward without him, saying he would be safer on his own. Then the brother-drone dives into the clouds to catch the rain-drone.

Personal opinion: Beautiful and deep, although quite intricated at the beginning (it took me a while to tell the brother-drone and the rain-drone apart). This author had fantastic ideas and I related a lot to the two brothers, but also to the football player, who hasn't always been a positive character. The descriptions mix weather, sports and First Nations' culture and I found them impressive. Unfortunately, all the characters were boys and the ending felt incomplete, but I still liked this story the most.

4 – Eulogy to Each and Every End

Summary: Master and apprentice are the town's undertakers and they are tasked with burying a man who died at 118. They sew a special dress with spores so that the corpse decomposes faster, but they need to prepare the decorations so that they reflect the dead's life and deeds. After that they celebrate a town fair where all the walls are repainted and they go see the stars. Six months pass; another townsman dies and the two talk about their insecurities as they prepare his burial suit. After more weeks, an unknown corpse is found by the roadside and they sew her a dress. A year later, the master passes away and the former apprentice's first work as a master is her burial suit.

Personal opinion: Dialogues were quite expositive, but the Brazilian town's atmosphere was delightful. Unfortunately the first half is almost only descriptions, and the first relevant event is described too quickly. I didn't like how the narration is organized (I have no emotional bonds towards the dead, and the information that he was a dear friend of the apprentice is only told way later). The premise and the setting were really creative, but it ended up being another story about insecurities; death and mourning turned out to be secondary, almost part of the background.

3 – Mousedeer Versus the Ghost Ships

Summary: An automated fishing boat enters the MCs' bay, which get in action in order to free the fish and detour it. The story moves on to them playing some tabletop game as they do something else, then work on some plants. They locate another automated machine that steals sand from the bay, but they don't try to stop it right away. Until it topples over, and one of the MCs is lost in the incident; they find her and take her to safety.

Personal opinion: Despite the catchy opening, I kept getting distracted; I found the prose somewhat hostile but I couldn't quite put my finger on the exact reason. I dropped it several times before finishing it. Interesting Southeast Asian setting, but nothing else really struck me. Especially frustrating: the first-person narration with so little said about the narrator.

2 – Last Tuesday For Eternity

Summary: The MC is an android with a wrist malfunction: xe understands that after 130 years the time has come for xe to turn off, even if xe has just fallen in love. Xe and xyr (?) partner see another human/android couple, the second has been repaired many times. The MC reflects on how to tell him about xyr malfunction; eventually xe does, and together they go through all the reparation options; then it is implied that the android won't die but just change. The two head to the burial site, where they choose the plant under which the MC will be buried. Another android unmounts xyr hand, then xyr conscience dissolves.

Personal opinion: Fantastic opening, and the way information is spread out shows that the author has both talent and practice. The android's pronouns were a bit clunky at the beginning, but then I got used to them; other than that, the prose was clear and easy to follow. The android was perhaps too human, but it helped empathize with xyr; some dialogues were a bit too expositive, especially in the second half. I don't think I fully understood the ending.

1 – Meet me Under the Molokhia

Summary: The MC lives in Lebanon, next to the dismissed prototypes of these 'molokhia'. As she wanders through a wood, she has a vision of someone grabbing a snake, perhaps a djinn. Her cousin reaches her, and as they chat on the way home she meets the djinn again, who reveals her name. Two days later, as she's gardening, the djinn appears once more; she takes her to the roof and tells her that her grandparents were wealthy benefactors. Her aunt has seen her with the djinn, so she reveals she too had once fallen in love with a djinn. The two meet again and kiss under the sunset.

Personal opinion: Uninspiring infodump opening; the djinn speaks as if she's of her same age (which is later revealed to be the case, but it severely diminished my sense of wonder), and the flirting starts right off the bat. It felt like a romance story with a few solarpunk details tossed in at the last minute. Personally, this story is very out of place in this contest and I'm surprised it got awarded the first place.

General Conclusions

When I started reading these stories, I expected the best Solarpunk of the year; yet halfway through the anthology I realized that having such an approach would only leave me very disappointed. I had to recalibrate my expectations to a generic clifi that touches far less themes than solarpunk. Stories about technology were a minority, while the bulk consisted in personal or family dramas that, albeit not out of place in solarpunk (they are necessary and valid!), shouldn't be the weight-bearing pillar of every story.

I wanted to read more adventures, more anticapitalism and more imagination on the relationships that we have and will have with technology, nature and the rest of society. 2200 is a long way down the road, and this anthology provided me with very few glimpses of that horizon. It felt myopic, stuck on a present that is understandably terrifying, and unable to really visualize the way past these obstacles. Solarpunk aims to be a telescope, not a mirror.

As a writer of solarpunk myself I'm aware how multi-tiered the challenge is. I know firsthand that imagining a whole society, several communities and characters for every story is a challenge; this is magnified by the youth of the genre, which still lacks clear hieroglyphs (i.e. clear narrative symbols) recognizable from other texts of culture. Even if a writer is able to come up with an approachable, comprehensible and concise vision, compressing it to a short-story format seems next to impossible.

There are some projects aiming to make this process easier, like the Solarpunk Prompts Podcast podcast proposing a series of pre-researched dramatic situations, communities facing a problem, ready to be fleshed out by a writer.

Hopefully these insights will help you shape the telescope you need.

• Andrea “Clockwork” Barresi