10 ms·

Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards a Solarpunk Future

182 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

davedx 6y ago
So many tropes I couldn’t finish the article, I wanted to like it based on the headline but blegh
vsareto 6y ago
IMO Solarpunk is cool, but it's not going to offer many realistic social lessons or warnings like cyberpunk does because it still relies on globalisation, huge logistics networks, and large factories to support the lifestyle and direction it promotes. In that sense, it's at odds with itself because there's still a divided population who have to work to support that infrastructure while the solarpunks get the real freedom of living.
- _jahh 6y ago
  I'd like to believe the punk component is like DIY 3-d printing wind turbine arrays, setting up solar powered mesh networks financed by distributed cryptocoin miners.
  - xarthna 6y ago
    This is how I interpreted it as well. As the article states, 'farming on every corner'.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Cyberpunk offers realistic social lessons or warnings? That is news to me like the number of cyborg street thugs and automatic weapon proliferation. Jokes aside it is a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy and more something that one can look back on and find resemblances by comparision like say Star Trek and Tricorders vs cell phones and replicators vs 3d printing. 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.
- playingchanges 6y ago
  I don’t think the infrastructure required for the scarcity free society necessarily has to be a global / universal one. The political angle seems more anarcho-socialist to me which would lead to a decentralized model enabled by technology. Think self sufficient city states.
tectonic 6y ago
I'm a big fan of this newsletter.
philipkglass 6y ago
Solarpunk is to solar technology as steampunk is to the industrial revolution. I mean that pejoratively. These x-punks are generally an aesthetic set-dressed with anachronistic and impossible developments that don't mesh together. (Though I suppose I would also say that of most cyberpunk written this century.) 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.
defertoreptar 6y ago
> Most importantly Solarpunk is a rejection of dystopic fears and a return to hope, not as a con-trick, but as a construct. 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.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >"Solarpunk," to me, sounds pretty wholesome and very much in line with the direction that society wants to go. 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.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    Biden would be what 107 years old by that time.
    - labster 6y ago
      He’s Biden his time.
  - notankies 6y ago
    That's right, we need to end fossil fuel usage right now. If we don't switch solely to solar and wind worldwide in the next ten years there's going to be an apocalyptic ecological event. It's a climate crisis. I don't understand why people can't just follow the science. It doesn't matter how much food and energy prices would rise if fossil fuels were abruptly banned; a few poor peoples' ability to eat or stay warm is nothing in the face of the climate crisis. https://rebellion.earth https://rebellion.earth
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >If we don't switch solely to solar and wind worldwide in the next ten years there's going to be an apocalyptic ecological event. 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...
mortenjorck 6y ago
The problem with solarpunk is right there in its name: Nearly everything that gets labeled solarpunk is simply not punk. 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.
- detaro 6y ago
  I think the article is working with an extremely wide and weak definition of the term, which indeed runs into that problem. But I think that's a problem with the term being applied to anything "green and hopeful". 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".
  - throwaway8451 6y ago
    I would put Solarpunk rather in the accelerate/anti-auth corner of a chart with axes for (anti)authoritarian-iness and pro-/contra-progress as I saw it on Twitter once. 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).
bluntfang 6y ago
ITT: hackernews community (white middle-upper class white people) talk about what is and isn't punk.
ruined 6y ago
many of you here in the comments misunderstand. 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.
- 627467 6y ago
  I agree. I also agree that the author, like many who try to define solarpunk by pulling utopic goals (ie startrek utopia, singapore vs HK) and fantasies, confuse the readers on what is punk and solarpunk. 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lawrenceyan 6y ago
  I wrote a bit about Solarpunk a few months back in March [0]. 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-face-despair-future-lawrence-yan/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/possibility-adversity-hope-fa...
- playingchanges 6y ago
black_puppydog 6y ago
The one problem I have with solarpunk is that much of the fiction is simply not that good. I think most emblematic of that is maybe Cory Doctorow's book "Walkaway". 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.
- evgen 6y ago
  Doctorow is a pundit and pseudo-futurist who thinks he can write (or at least has convinced some small subset of this particular delusion.) In small doses like short stories or selected snippets from his novels there is a bit of fun, but too much and it becomes apparent that he is better at the idea than the literary execution.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    I tend to agree, except with the tone of your message, or the tone as it arrived at my end at least. 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.
    - evgen 6y ago
      Don't want to trash talk Doctorow, but I just think he missed his calling at the New Yorker or somewhere similar writing near-future short stories that were subtle critique of current issues. If we criticize Neal Stephenson for building great worlds and telling an interesting story but not being able to consistently stick the landing then I think Doctorow builds the world but can never really get a good story going. They are all better writers than I, but overall Doctorow to me seems a bit over-hyped for someone who under-delivers on the possibilities of his world-building.
vehementi 6y ago
I'm still trying to find an RTX 3080 for Cyberpunk and people are already talking about Solarpunk? WTF
ASpaceCowboi 6y ago
I love all of the comments happening in this post.
incompatible 6y ago
It's yet another word for libertarian communism / anarcho-communism / anarchism / communalism in the tradition of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Bookchin and Graeber. Obviously it has a long and interesting intellectual tradition. The basic principles are rejection of all forms of social hierarchy and inequality (nobody can give orders, and all work is voluntary), and rejection of private property (you get access to what you currently need from the shared resources of the community). Perhaps the only law needed would be to prohibit doing harm, or risking harm, to others, at least without their consent. The few practical implementations (in a Western, developed context) have generally succumbed to outside forces, such as Catalonia in the 1930s, and perhaps Rojava today.
- tclancy 6y ago
  Punk and the anarchy movements are orthogonal to Libertarianism. They require you to get over yourself enough to both talk to, and care about, your neighbors.
  - incompatible 6y ago
    The word libertarianism was originally used in the communist context, and was also called anarchism, and was opposed to authoritarian communism. It was later hijacked (in the US context) by property-worshipping followers of John Locke and the like.
    - tclancy 6y ago
      Which is wonderful, but less than likely the context your typical HN galaxy brain means when he mentions it.
adamsea 6y ago
Regardless of the ideas the word and 'movement' will just become another brand ... I love William Gibson (Neuromancer), Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell. Do I love cyberpunk? Ehhh ....
CptFribble 6y ago
Science fiction was born as a critique of social constructs. The sci-fi patina was less of a Branded Genre Thing and more of a wink-and-nod to make the critique acceptable in the public sphere. 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."
- netfl0 6y ago
  Very thoughtful analysis. But, perhaps the purpose was not to solve, perhaps it was to self-distinguish.
- netfl0 6y ago
  Additionally, reading through most other comments lends credence to your hypothesis. Well done.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Ok. I think that the popular aesthetics in science fiction actually do have a very significant effect on daily life though. So although it's great to actually work on solving problems, it's still somewhat worthwhile to have science fiction, and in that case think about the worldview. 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?
- 6y ago
guram11 6y ago
Cyberpunk or Solarpunk , be resilience in holding on to your beliefs and not be a sheep just because will always remains the best direction for younger generations
anthk 6y ago
I'd love a solarpunk MUD installed under a solar powered rpi, but I am no English native. On that MUD you would fight oil corporations and mafias with solar technology such as solar powered graphene computers and weapons, along with high-tech cannons converting solar radiation energy into a behemoth ray.

182 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

So many tropes I couldn’t finish the article, I wanted to like it based on the headline but blegh

IMO Solarpunk is cool, but it's not going to offer many realistic social lessons or warnings like cyberpunk does because it still relies on globalisation, huge logistics networks, and large factories to support the lifestyle and direction it promotes. In that sense, it's at odds with itself because there's still a divided population who have to work to support that infrastructure while the solarpunks get the real freedom of living.

_jahh 6y ago
I'd like to believe the punk component is like DIY 3-d printing wind turbine arrays, setting up solar powered mesh networks financed by distributed cryptocoin miners.
- xarthna 6y ago
  This is how I interpreted it as well. As the article states, 'farming on every corner'.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Cyberpunk offers realistic social lessons or warnings? That is news to me like the number of cyborg street thugs and automatic weapon proliferation. Jokes aside it is a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy and more something that one can look back on and find resemblances by comparision like say Star Trek and Tricorders vs cell phones and replicators vs 3d printing. 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.
playingchanges 6y ago
I don’t think the infrastructure required for the scarcity free society necessarily has to be a global / universal one. The political angle seems more anarcho-socialist to me which would lead to a decentralized model enabled by technology. Think self sufficient city states.

tectonic 6y ago

I'm a big fan of this newsletter.

philipkglass 6y ago

Solarpunk is to solar technology as steampunk is to the industrial revolution. I mean that pejoratively. These x-punks are generally an aesthetic set-dressed with anachronistic and impossible developments that don't mesh together. (Though I suppose I would also say that of most cyberpunk written this century.) 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.

defertoreptar 6y ago

> Most importantly Solarpunk is a rejection of dystopic fears and a return to hope, not as a con-trick, but as a construct. 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.

bluntfang 6y ago
>"Solarpunk," to me, sounds pretty wholesome and very much in line with the direction that society wants to go. 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.
- baxtr 6y ago
  Biden would be what 107 years old by that time.
  - labster 6y ago
    He’s Biden his time.
- notankies 6y ago
  That's right, we need to end fossil fuel usage right now. If we don't switch solely to solar and wind worldwide in the next ten years there's going to be an apocalyptic ecological event. It's a climate crisis. I don't understand why people can't just follow the science. It doesn't matter how much food and energy prices would rise if fossil fuels were abruptly banned; a few poor peoples' ability to eat or stay warm is nothing in the face of the climate crisis. https://rebellion.earth https://rebellion.earth
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >If we don't switch solely to solar and wind worldwide in the next ten years there's going to be an apocalyptic ecological event. 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...

mortenjorck 6y ago

The problem with solarpunk is right there in its name: Nearly everything that gets labeled solarpunk is simply not punk. 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.

detaro 6y ago
I think the article is working with an extremely wide and weak definition of the term, which indeed runs into that problem. But I think that's a problem with the term being applied to anything "green and hopeful". 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".
- throwaway8451 6y ago
  I would put Solarpunk rather in the accelerate/anti-auth corner of a chart with axes for (anti)authoritarian-iness and pro-/contra-progress as I saw it on Twitter once. 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).

bluntfang 6y ago

ITT: hackernews community (white middle-upper class white people) talk about what is and isn't punk.

ruined 6y ago

many of you here in the comments misunderstand. 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.

627467 6y ago
I agree. I also agree that the author, like many who try to define solarpunk by pulling utopic goals (ie startrek utopia, singapore vs HK) and fantasies, confuse the readers on what is punk and solarpunk. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lawrenceyan 6y ago
I wrote a bit about Solarpunk a few months back in March [0]. 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-face-despair-future-lawrence-yan/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/possibility-adversity-hope-fa...
playingchanges 6y ago

black_puppydog 6y ago

The one problem I have with solarpunk is that much of the fiction is simply not that good. I think most emblematic of that is maybe Cory Doctorow's book "Walkaway". 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.

evgen 6y ago
Doctorow is a pundit and pseudo-futurist who thinks he can write (or at least has convinced some small subset of this particular delusion.) In small doses like short stories or selected snippets from his novels there is a bit of fun, but too much and it becomes apparent that he is better at the idea than the literary execution.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I tend to agree, except with the tone of your message, or the tone as it arrived at my end at least. 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.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Don't want to trash talk Doctorow, but I just think he missed his calling at the New Yorker or somewhere similar writing near-future short stories that were subtle critique of current issues. If we criticize Neal Stephenson for building great worlds and telling an interesting story but not being able to consistently stick the landing then I think Doctorow builds the world but can never really get a good story going. They are all better writers than I, but overall Doctorow to me seems a bit over-hyped for someone who under-delivers on the possibilities of his world-building.

vehementi 6y ago

I'm still trying to find an RTX 3080 for Cyberpunk and people are already talking about Solarpunk? WTF

ASpaceCowboi 6y ago

I love all of the comments happening in this post.

incompatible 6y ago

It's yet another word for libertarian communism / anarcho-communism / anarchism / communalism in the tradition of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Bookchin and Graeber. Obviously it has a long and interesting intellectual tradition. The basic principles are rejection of all forms of social hierarchy and inequality (nobody can give orders, and all work is voluntary), and rejection of private property (you get access to what you currently need from the shared resources of the community). Perhaps the only law needed would be to prohibit doing harm, or risking harm, to others, at least without their consent. The few practical implementations (in a Western, developed context) have generally succumbed to outside forces, such as Catalonia in the 1930s, and perhaps Rojava today.

tclancy 6y ago
Punk and the anarchy movements are orthogonal to Libertarianism. They require you to get over yourself enough to both talk to, and care about, your neighbors.
- incompatible 6y ago
  The word libertarianism was originally used in the communist context, and was also called anarchism, and was opposed to authoritarian communism. It was later hijacked (in the US context) by property-worshipping followers of John Locke and the like.
  - tclancy 6y ago
    Which is wonderful, but less than likely the context your typical HN galaxy brain means when he mentions it.

adamsea 6y ago

Regardless of the ideas the word and 'movement' will just become another brand ... I love William Gibson (Neuromancer), Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell. Do I love cyberpunk? Ehhh ....

CptFribble 6y ago

Science fiction was born as a critique of social constructs. The sci-fi patina was less of a Branded Genre Thing and more of a wink-and-nod to make the critique acceptable in the public sphere. 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."

netfl0 6y ago
Very thoughtful analysis. But, perhaps the purpose was not to solve, perhaps it was to self-distinguish.
netfl0 6y ago
Additionally, reading through most other comments lends credence to your hypothesis. Well done.
ilaksh 6y ago
Ok. I think that the popular aesthetics in science fiction actually do have a very significant effect on daily life though. So although it's great to actually work on solving problems, it's still somewhat worthwhile to have science fiction, and in that case think about the worldview. 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?
6y ago

guram11 6y ago

Cyberpunk or Solarpunk , be resilience in holding on to your beliefs and not be a sheep just because will always remains the best direction for younger generations

anthk 6y ago

I'd love a solarpunk MUD installed under a solar powered rpi, but I am no English native. On that MUD you would fight oil corporations and mafias with solar technology such as solar powered graphene computers and weapons, along with high-tech cannons converting solar radiation energy into a behemoth ray.