Solarpunk Reflections

Finding good solarpunk novels is still quite challenging, given that the genre has barely a decade under its belt. The positive side of this current landscape is that when something notable pops up, it easily makes the rounds: in niche online communities, word of mouth still rules. This is how Murder in the Tool Library caught my attention and, as you can imagine, raised my expectations. So let’s start with those first, which is unusual in a review but it might shed some light on why I’m so terribly disappointed by this novel.

What I Wanted (or Hoped)

When I imagine a crime novel in a solarpunk setting, several questions naturally pop up: how does a utopian society deal with severe interpersonal wrongings? How does an investigation take place without surveillance? How do processes look like without police, courts, prisons, and so on?

This is exactly the point of speculative fiction: imagining how different societies handle (or prevent!) nasty modern problems. The point of solarpunk, among other things, is exactly to make one wonder about these possibilities even before touching page one. Moreover, the author, A.E. Marling, is not new to fiction: he’s been writing fantasy since 2013, so I expected some expertise and finesse in weaving a story and delivering satisfying character arcs or plot beats.

All this was in my mind when I picked up the novel, and I really wanted to believe it would be a good one, since I haven’t added anything to my Must Read List in a long time. It looks like it was not enough.

There will be minor spoilers, but I will try to keep them vague enough that you can read the novel on your own. I’m going to discuss ideas and concepts more than story elements or plot twists, except for the ending.

What Worked

I’m going to explain in detail all the issues I have with the novel, but first I have to say that I genuinely liked some of the ideas here. As I said above, the thought experiment of how to deal with murders, reparations and justice in a utopian society without unjustly immiserating anyone is absolutely crucial and timely in a world like ours, where regardless of geography police abuse is rampant and the judicial system treats elites differently from everyday citizens. So the premise (a boy gets murdered in plain day in a public place; how does a utopian society react?) is genuinely interesting, and the first chapter is quite the hook.

I also found the first idea of the novel quite clever: unlike most crime fiction, in which a clever, larger-than-life detective (and maybe his assistant) finds all the evidence and eventually unmasks the culprit via logical reasoning and outstanding deductions, here the task is taken up by the CDS, a group of volunteer detectives who dedicate what time they can spare to try and mend these episodes of societal and interpersonal misconduct.

The investigation then takes place with plentiful input from other citizens, who irregularly contribute by providing additional information, pointing out details that detectives missed on the murder scene, looking up backgrounds and so on, via a shared chat. I found all these ideas very clever: it’s the opposite of detective stories, far away from the lone genius cracking a puzzle as a challenge for his own ego, and instead a society that collectively puts time and effort to deal with the untimely loss of a member of their community. This had almost convinced me that this was it, the thoughtful and grounded solarpunk that I was looking for!

Alas, the dystopia that followed proved me wrong.

What Didn’t Work

Now, this part will be longer; I did not like the rest of the novel, but I’m not going to spend thousands of words to scream that it sucked or the author sucks at writing. Sure, I do have gripes of personal taste with the use of commas or descriptions or the detectives' characterizations, but these are minor elements; the next person might love them and the next one might not even notice them, so it’s not useful to discuss them. I’m going to discuss why some ideas in the novel did not work, could never work and are actively against the premise of a utopian or solarpunk society.

Let’s begin from the crowdsourcing of information, which is the first element that made me suspicious about the setting. In order to have full participation in the investigative process, everything is livestreamed. All the detectives film and record and share everything, which is the go-to way to make the whole procedure as democratic as possible. But at the same time (and the story itself sort of realizes this in the first half) it spawns an all-encompassing culture of spectacle. People are not drawn in the investigation out of genuine concern for the stability of their society, but out of drama. This does not stop at the investigation, but it goes on and becomes grotesque during the process of the culprit in the last few chapters (more on this later). In an attempt to envision a more democratic process, the author has recreated a digital version of public hanging that none of the characters opposes.

Secondly, the author puts a great deal of attention on mental health and the importance of therapy… to the point it becomes a universal antidote for societal issues. As the investigation proceeds, it is revealed that the perpetrator is affected by a mental disorder and he was deceiving everyone else so well that he managed to avoid therapy for his whole life. And if you’re raising an eyebrow to that phrasing (instead of, for example, “refuse professional help”), let me bring up the example of Vittoria (one of the detectives whose name is needed in this review, since the story betrays a clear preference from the side of the author). Upon meeting a citizen who reacts badly to her presence (quote: “Stuck-up freak!”, so not even a slur or anything seriously offensive), she reacts by “activating a program that would crack his identity, message him in one hour, and inform him he must produce proof of therapy for his behavior or face censure.”

Now, I know we all have slightly different visions of utopia and solarpunk, but this is an exchange that could only happen in a dystopic surveillance state in which therapy is ministered in a Foucauldian sense: to enact control, silence dissent, or put people behind medical and institutional barriers to make their lives harder under the pretense of providing help.

This does not end here. While the first half of the novel is dedicated to investigating the crime scene and possible clues (as is standard practice in most crime fictions), the second half locks in on a single suspect and the detectives’ efforts are not dedicated to crack the sequence of events that exclude every other possible character, but rather to prove that the suspect is in fact really a psychopath. The impression I got from the text (regardless if this was the author's intention) was that the suspect was being investigated not much for committing a crime but for being a deviant (of which committing murder was just another clue).

In order to do this, the detectives commit a slew of unthinkable breaches that would not fly even in our current societies (irrespective of geographical location): they search his house without his consent or knowledge (through a warrant obtained shadily by pressuring a community council) to search his belongings and find proof of killed animals in his youth; Vittoria pretends to go on a date with him to conduct a non-consensual nor informed interrogation (I have heard of only one similar real-life story, and it was from a Chinese dissident), and they even desecrate his mother’s corpse (again, no consent nor knowledge) to prove that he had poisoned his mother! What began as a murder investigation moves beyond the murder itself and quickly devolves into a relentless manhunt, in which the detectives have at their disposal every common tool used by our modern-day police to press their charges.

Every abuse of power by the detectives is presented as justified and even necessary, since the killer is a psychopath and therefore would lie at every occasion; an ontologically evil being that would only carry out evil actions and for which this ‘utopian’ society clearly has no answer. Leaving the un-solarpunk moral dilemma aside (is the murderer beyond salvation because he's a psychopath, or can he repent and be rehabilitated after mandatory therapy?), the author has uncomfortably stepped onto something important: that it would be really hard to conduct ‘investigations’ as we normally experience them while at the same time having the culprit consensually cooperate. The author sees all this, and instead of trying to devise a different method (which would’ve been imaginative and no doubt challenging, but worth the effort!), he goes the other way and strips the culprit of every decency on the grounds of psychopathy.

The author desperately tries to paint the killer as the unforgivable bad guy, and yet I found myself empathizing with him precisely because of the unjustified and repeated abuse he received through the whole story.

Before concluding, I have to spend a few lines to discuss the climax scene of the process, since it is truly the epitome of grotesque.

After the culprit has been apprehended, Vittoria dishes our her impassioned speech to demand the maximum punishment: “a sentence of dehumanization” (very solarpunk), while the whole city is watching (via livestream). Through the whole scene, the culprit is mouthfolded (they can’t allow him to speak, because, you guessed it, he would only lie!) and can only reply via keyboard; this doesn’t matter, because his messages are never shown. He does not have any defense attorney (which should be a minimum right, at least in Italy and Finland, but supposedly in USA as well, given the author’s origins) and it is implied that the ‘jury’ eventually does commit the maximum punishment, and the culprit is stripped of any right except those of parasites.

Now, I’m not an expert on judicial systems, but one thing I can say for sure: a society in which criminals don’t have rights can eliminate dissent at will. If criminals don’t have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and those people will no longer have rights. In the specific case of this novel, detectives can conjure evidence of psychopathy and persuade the whole society that they do not deserve empathy nor help and are worthy of elimination.

Would you like to live in such a utopia?

Warping the Narrative

So let’s focus on this Vittoria character I’ve been talking about, the ‘femme fatale’ that is mentioned in the novel’s blurb.

The author never fails to remark three things about her: her height, her charisma and her... righteous bloodthirst, almost to the point of obsession. This betrays a clear preference for this character on the side of the author, and indeed she gets the best treatment of the whole cast: the ending declares her eponymous victory at the expense of the killer, something that no other character celebrates.

I have three interpretations for Vittoria’s character. First: she embodies the old violent cop archetype, moved by personal revenge or moral duty. Second: Vittoria is also a villain, and other detectives will have to face her in a follow-up novel. And third: she’s another psychopath, just like the killer himself, but unlike him she managed to channel her tendencies into a respected profession in which she’s allowed to have some leeway, provided that she does not harm anyone else in the process. None of these options strike me as interesting in a solarpunk setting; the first might have been an interesting character arc (the former cop that needs to learn how to operate in a new, more respectful and humane system after years of service where abuse was normalized), but it was not the story this novel ended up telling. Vittoria is always presented as cool, her flaws are always minimized, her deeds justified, and on top of all this she always gets her way. The story lets her win every time: some characters here and there try to push back, but they fold after two lines and admit defeat.

In any other genre, this might have been an interesting story; a Psycho-Pass-eqsue manhunt in which the huntress is revealed to be not just another monster but the better monster, because she can rein in her impulses and (ab)use the tools of the society around her to conceal her bloodthirst and channel it towards other monsters. This is a fantastic concept for a crime novel, maybe even for a cyberpunk one, although it still relies on the (faulty, in my opinion) assumption that some people are born evil and can only pretend to be decent members of a society.

However, this story in a solarpunk setting reads completely different. It becomes a tragedy in which an overly charismatic character warps and derails a collective process by abusing her personal influence to enact on her most violent impulses. The whole story moves away from the speculative intent of solarpunk investigations and reparations, and gets hijacked by Vittoria's and the killer's relentless (but unbalanced) duel to determine who can keep pretending in the eyes of the public and avoid punishment. In particular, the last third of the story is a character study on the normalization of cruelty. Where’s the solarpunk in that?

Let me end the review with a final spoiler from the very last page of the novel, in which it is implied that Vittoria eventually manages to kill the drugged and isolated culprit with the same weapon that was found on the crime scene.

So I ask again: whose utopia is this?

• Andrea “Clockwork” Barresi