I don’t know if the world as a whole has changed because of solarpunk. But I’m happy to see that others have picked up the torch. There have been a number of anthologies on the subject (Wings of Renewal, Sunvault, etc.) and a broader move towards climate fiction. Of course, it’s hard to stay ahead of news headlines, which tend to be moving faster than a lot of the current imagination.

I never expected that people I’ve never met would be debating ideas I thought it would be fun to help popularize, but they’re out there, in a somewhat surprising array: disability activists, political theorists, and teenage cartoonists. But it’s definitely more “real” than it was two years ago. It’s starting to be a term one can throw around, though I’m sure it means different things to different people.

One exciting development, personally speaking, was that “Sunshine State,” a story I co-wrote with Andrew Dana Hudson, won the climate fiction contest run by Arizona State University and will be published in their forthcoming anthology Everything Change. It was a blind process, so the story had to stand up to multiple rounds of judges, with final selections by Kim Stanley Robinson himself. So having the author of the Mars trilogy call our piece “a true pleasure to read” is both gratifying and still kind of hard to believe.

Forgive me if I get philosophical here, but I can sketch out an answer. Here’s the short version:

• an unbalanced focus on science and technology leads to a view of everything in the world as something to be worked on, extracted, or twisted towards one’s goals. (We can call this “instrumentalism” or “enframing.”)
• This instrumentalized view of the world, when not contained by a strong belief system or ethical groundwork, tends to create monstrosities: Frankenstein, Mountaintop-removal mining, ethnic cleansing.
  • Frequently, this is expressed as unintended consequences (effects we did not expect), but also important are unacknowledged consequences (effects we would rather not admit are true.)
• Since the 1960s, we have learned the limits of pure instrumentalism. The cultural response has produced works like “Small is Beautiful,” and popularized Slow Food.
  • But “sustainable, organic” creations too often become consumer objects for the rich. We have not developed a suitable replacement that works for a world of 9 billion people.
• The coming of climate change means that people in a position to change things can no longer afford to ignore the consequences of the system we live in.
• It is the work of philosophy and the arts to develop a new groundwork for living together peacefully on a smaller, hotter, more volatile world.

Finally, we can ask if the term “science fiction” is a little too Modernist these days. (Not ‘modern’ meaning here and now, but captial-M “Modernist,” meaning a style of instrumentalist thinking focused on bringing nature and society into ‘rational’ order. Modernists believed that science would spill open all the secrets of life, and that it could then be easily engineered into drastically better forms.) Maybe we need to think in terms of Visionary Fiction, or Speculative Fiction. When protestors wave a banner reading “another world is possible,” they’re talking about possible futures, but it’s not necessarily one driven by technological innovation.

I think it may have started as a happy accident, but there are good reasons one can look at Art Nouveau (and related movements, like the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris) as deeply congruent with solarpunk. Those movements wanted to bring beauty to common objects (like the Paris Metro signs), to investigate organic forms in what we might call early biomimicry. They wanted to connect people with the materiality of making, of pride in craft, in an era when mass production was sweeping everything.

It’s also worth noting that greenhouses, atriums, and arcades were a big part of architecture during the Edwardian/Belle Epoque years. There was a lot of exploration into passive solar architecture cut short by the advent of WWI.

There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness. 

(from Laudato Si)