Imaginary Worlds - Solarpunk the Future

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Cyberpunk was cool. Steampunk was hip. Get ready for Solarpunk. This new emerging genre of art and fiction imagines a future where DIY environmental sustainability dictates the design of everything from skyscraper farms to homemade fashion. The writer Adam Flynn, magazine editors Scot and Jane Noel, writer Sarena Ulibarri, and game designer Keisha Howard discuss how we can create the future we want by inspiring people with science fiction, and why being anti-dystopia doesn’t mean they believe in utopias. Featuring readings by Vanessa Bellow. DreamForge magazine: https://dreamforge.mywebportal.app/ Glass and Gardens Summers and Winters: http://www.sarenaulibarri.com/editing.html Notes Towards a Solarpunk Manifesto: https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/ Sugar Gamers: https://sugargamers.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken? Well, let's say I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple. Starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss.

See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. Free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancingbalancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them

and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Ever since COVID-19 spread around the world, one of the few silver linings is that emissions are down dramatically. I mean, you've probably seen the before and after satellite pictures. Although now people are just taking pictures of their own cities, where the sky used to be brown with smog, and now it's bright blue. And I've been wondering, when we finally emerge from this crisis, will climate change be a priority again anytime soon? And how much of an impact can we have collectively, as individuals, if governments are not willing to step up?

And that brings me back to science fiction. Specifically, a new environmental sci-fi genre called solarpunk, which imagines a future where renewable energy is the prime motive for designing anything, big or small. Now, Solarpunk should not be confused with Steampunk. Steampunk imagines, what if modern gadgets were made with late 19th or early 20th century technology? Like, there are Steampunk computers that are made out of old typewriters and gramophones. And that is a decorative object. You would not actually want to use that computer. But imagining a solar punk computer and using it in real life is the goal of the movement. Although steampunk and solar punk are similar in that they're both genres, like there can be solar

punk fiction, solar punk artwork, solar punk fashion. I even saw a solar punk card game. solar punk fashion. I even saw a solar punk card game. In 2014, the writer Adam Flynn wrote a solar punk manifesto for Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. He says it all began when he was talking with friends. I was having a conversation with a co-worker of mine who is also a young adult fiction novelist. And she had just published her first novel and was thinking about like, okay, what are the genres that are going to be in next? Because at that point there was sort of a big upsurge of this sort of young dystopia as a genre. She said, solar punk. And we're like, oh, that's a word. That's a word to think about. Adam thought that his friend had invented the word solar punk, but they later discovered other

people had the same idea around the same time, which shows that solar punk is growing organically out of the zeitgeist. In fact, my listeners have been suggesting solar punk for a while, but at first I wasn't sure what to say about it because the genre is so new. Then I put the hashtag solar punk into Tumblr to see what images came up. And that's when I got it. I mean, the word punk sounds gritty, but the high concept futuristic paintings that I saw were so refreshing and warm. Imagine architecture with impossible curves and a lot of glass and greenery everywhere, like the number of trees that you'd expect to see in a park coming out of windows, balconies,

roofs, or elevated walkways. One picture had a human-designed forest contained in a series of skyscraper cones in the middle of an urban grid. I also came across a Nigerian artist who had created a series of images of a shantytown that had been transformed into a group of futuristic, solar-powered, circular habitats that were connected by elevated walkways. The image was so striking, it took me a minute to realize it was a proposal for a series of structures that did not exist yet. Serena Ulibarri is a fiction writer who edits a solar punk anthology called Glass and Gardens.

Most of the technology that's used in solar punk artwork and fiction already exists. But what we do is we take it and shine it up, make it look real pretty, and then it makes it more appealing. And it was the architecture that first captured her imagination, although at the time she was actually at a writing workshop. At the time, I had been writing a lot of dystopian stuff, and I've always had environmental concerns, and I was trying to work that into my fiction, but I was doing it from that grimdark dystopian aspect. And it was exhausting, and I wasn't doing

it very well. There's a lot of cliches in there's, there's just so much of it done. So anyway, one of my classmates was from Singapore. He was describing the biodomes of Singapore and, you know, this building that's shaped like a Lotus that like opens up, uh, you know, with the solar panel, solar panels that look like a Lotus leaf and stuff like that. And I was just like, what are you talking about? That sounds amazing. And I like pulled up some pictures on my phone. I was like, that's what you're talking about? And he said, yeah, that's my hood. We live in the future. And I was like, what? The future can look like that? Again, Adam Flynn. There's a lot of this idea of like, can we make infrastructure beautiful? Can we live in harmony with the things around us? There's a lot of lush green spaces. There's a lot of organic forms, a lot of inspiration from Art Nouveau and sort of the arts and crafts movement, William Morris. So it's not your sort of stark white iPhone modernism.

white iPhone modernism. You know, it's interesting. When you mentioned Art Nouveau, I did notice that, and I was thinking, oh, that's pretty, but I didn't really think about it in terms of it's much more purposeful, it sounds like,

because it feels organic. And it's so interesting that it's different from an iPhone, which is sleek. It probably has more of a corporate feel to it now, that kind of design. There is a lot of solarpunk being one of the sort of one of the reactions against uh sort of modernism and

especially the kind of corporate slick modernist design that you might see in terms of you know a lot of visual clarity and grids and you know, but it not being something that, you know, you can't fix an iPhone. They have deliberately engineered it to make it harder for you to repair it yourself. And it's also been engineered such that you kind of have to replace it every couple years. And then you start asking questions of, well, okay, and what are the rare earth elements in this phone? And where did they come from? And what happens to that phone once it's discarded?

Exactly, exactly. So the question of like, all right, well, what would a Solarpunk phone be like? It's not just what it looks like, but where it exists within an entire sort of chain of production and use and social meaning. And what would a solar punk video game be like? Keisha Howard is trying to figure that out. She works in the video game industry, and she gave a TEDx talk on solar punk. When I first was writing my speech for the solar punk tedx my little brother he asked

me he was like what's so punk about solar punk because everything you're saying about it it's nice did you ever come up with like a really concise answer to be like you know what i thought about it and here's the answer yeah the the the punk part is the sacrifices we would make now and the people who wouldn't want to make those sacrifices. Like if we all did DIY, if we all like, you know, band together to do this, to have this solar punk future, not everybody is going to be into that. There are whole economies that need the production of things that harm our environment, right? So to change that would be very difficult. And that would be sort of kind of a fight. It would be bucking the current system of capitalism that we have now. And that's kind of punk, right? anniversary of Earth Day. It is a very established global holiday. But like Solar Punk, when Earth Day began 50 years ago, it was an experiment started by a few people that hoped it would catch on. It's creating something new, right? Like Earth Day was a new holiday. It tried to

fill a need that people saw around like, we need to celebrate and really have a day of of reckoning with our relationship with this planet we are entering a very uncertain and scary time in our history and solar punk is a ray of hope and i could use a ray of hope right now. So we're going to look into what's motivating the writers and artists behind this movement and why they're still optimistic about the future. That is after the break. We'll see you next time. Total Body Deodorant now. Now to understand solarpunk, we need to know what it's reacting against, which is primarily cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was pioneered by writers like William

Gibson in the 1980s, where they imagined a future where giant corporations use media to connect people through cyberspace, where hackers can live virtual lives, merging their bodies with technology in a way that feels punk and DIY. But everything they're using to build their sense of identity is controlled and surveilled by giant tech corporations. So yeah, we are living in the future that they imagined based on the trends that they saw 30 and 40 years ago. Cyberpunk also became the dominant sci-fi aesthetic, from The Matrix to Ready Player One. Although the pop culture shorthand for cyberpunk is Blade Runner. Not the plot of the movie, but the visuals. In fact, most of the people that I talked with

about solar punk explicitly said they do not want to live in a Blade Runner future, which is ironic because the 1982 movie Blade Runner took place in the year 2019. Now Adam Flynn still likes cyberpunk novels. To the credit of the initial wave of cyberpunk authors, they were writing this as a reflection and an interrogation of what was going on in the world around them

and in many ways attempting to warn people. The problem is, if dystopia is really cool and people have robot arms, that's going to infect people's dreams and you end up building that future anyway. And Keisha Howard does not think that cyberpunk and solarpunk are mutually exclusive. In fact, if we are living in the world that cyberpunk authors imagined, then she thinks we need to decide if we want to keep going in that direction or live in a different future of our own design. I mean, for her, solarpunk is more of a reaction against a different genre of science fiction,

where humans terraform Mars or figure out how to live on other planets because the Earth is a lost cause. That bothers her. Because all of us can't go move to Mars anytime soon, no matter what Elon Musk is saying. Like, we're not all moving to Mars. I don't want to move to Mars, even if I could. But like, if we can just kind of pivot towards something where we're still living on Earth instead of like having to leave it because we've destroyed it with pollution or atomic bombs or whatever dystopic stories that we've been fed, like that would be kind of cool, you know? And since Solarpunk is so new, Keisha feels like she could get in on the ground floor.

new, Keisha feels like she could get in on the ground floor. Like when you look at a cyberpunk story, right? It's like a thing if the lead is a woman or a person of color or just a non-white male. And solarpunk is so new and so fresh. Like you really can be anything in this particular sort of speculative fiction. So it's nice. It's just like, wow, I don't have to worry about telling a story and hinging so much of it on my perspective as a woman or a person of color. I can just hinge on it as a human trying to live in harmony with the earth. One of the things that I find fascinating about solar punk

is that it's the reversal of what I think of as the usual chain of events in science fiction, where a writer imagines current trends going into the future with dangerous consequences. Or, as the writer Frederick Pohl once famously said, a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam. Solarpunk does the opposite. It encourages writers and artists to imagine a specific type of future in the hopes that their work will inspire engineers to create that future. to create that future.

And Adam says there is precedence for this. In fact, he was inspired by one of the pioneers of cyberpunk, Neil Stevenson. There was an essay by Neil Stevenson about sort of the idea of a hieroglyph and science fiction as a hieroglyph, right? This sort of universal language that can be used across disciplines when you're building something really big or ambitious.

The idea being that moonshots were easier in the 1960s because everybody had read, you know, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and all of these sort of like golden age sci-fi writers. And so they could say, oh, you know, it's sort of like X or Y or Z. could say, oh, you know, it's sort of like X or Y or Z. Everybody that I talked with said they were still waiting for their big cultural moment, like a Hollywood solarpunk movie or a TV show that captures people's imagination. In the meantime, they've been retroactively classifying old novels as having been solarpunk, even if the writers aren't alive anymore.

Now, there have been solarpunk novels that have come out in the last several years, and there are more on the way from major writers like Becky Chambers, who wrote the Wayfarer series. But novels can take years to write. A lot of the momentum right now is really in short story anthologies because those writers can react more quickly to the zeitgeist. Scott and Jane Noel are a married couple who run a solar punk anthology magazine called Dream Forge. You know, I'm at this point 62 years old, so I grew up with, you know, science fiction being, hey, we're going to have these, you know, marvelous inventions and spaceships. The Star Trek future. The Star Trek future, yes. You know, that's kind of what we're going for. In fact, they think that Star Trek is a perfect example of what

solar punk is trying to accomplish. Because Star Trek inspired a lot of people to become scientists and engineers when they grew up. And the things that they invented look a lot like what we saw in Star Trek, from flip phones to voice activated AI to tablet computers. And I think like Star Trek is the future that we all want to get to. And it feels to me like solar punk is kind of the in-between of how we get there. Like when we're talking about the social justice and the community working together, it's like it's Star Trek's world. They already experienced that. They already got there. And solar punk feels like the step we need to take from here to Star Trek. The submission process for their magazine, Dream Forge, is fairly rigorous. They've gotten over 1,500 submissions, and those stories are evaluated by readers around the world.

We have a lot of readers and we really have that. They understand the vision of what we're trying to do. So these readers really say it's not a DreamForge story. That's a comment you'll see them put into the thing. It's a great story. It does this. It does this well. But it's not a DreamForge story.

We have had stories where they showed climate change, for instance, from the point of view of really total devastation. At the end, there's this little tiny bit of a feel of, oh, some fish survived and it looks like life might be returning to the Mediterranean or something. And then I was even talking to the authors and it's like, well, we thought that was a bit hopeful, a bit too hopeful. We thought we were being overly optimistic. And it's like, no, that's not overly optimistic. Optimistic is that there's a point where people basically reverse damage and change things for the better. And one of the stories that we have was from Italy,

and he was a climate scientist at some point. He's a writer and translator now. And his was of showing the devastation of climate change, but from the point of view of a time traveler who's coming back to our time, well, it's our future, actually. He's coming back to the time when the climate devastation is really terrible.

And he's trying to find a way to tell them without saying, hey, I'm a time traveler from the future. But he's trying to find a way to say to one of the women he's talking to in the story is, you'll get past this. That story she mentioned is called Sapiens by the writer Davida Mana. And here's the actress Vanessa Bello reading that scene, where the time traveler from the future tries to reassure a woman from our era that we're going to get through this climate catastrophe. The story is told from the time traveler's point of view. I looked at her. If you know what's wrong, why don't you change it? She turned away and looked at the sea, black water under black sky,

She turned away and looked at the sea, black water under black sky, the lights of the drones like distant fireflies. She shrugged. You can't change people, she said. 300,000 years of history disprove that belief. Change is the only constant in the history of our species. We should embrace it, not try and stave it off. She clicked her tongue and shook her head.

You have too much faith in humanity, she said. What if it's you that do not have enough? We are homo sapiens, not politicians. She chuckled, and her cheeks acquired a hint of color. My friend, she said, nodding, would not like such talk. I looked at the guy, surrounded by a bunch of hanger-ons. Some politico I was supposed to know. I would have liked to tell her we had lost the memory of such individuals, that she should not waste her time. What if he doesn't? I asked. She stared at me. There was no longer fear there, but curiosity. Are you preaching anarchy? She asked with an

impish smile. I am not a preacher, I replied. And I'd rather preach survival if I were. You can't change people, she repeated. It was the core of her belief, her faith. People can change, I replied. That's the spirit? I turned. My friend's companion was standing too close, smiling the aggressive smile of one who's in control. He gestured toward the darkness, where the drone lights illuminated a chunk of the Gutsloff signal tower, like a broken finger pointed at the sky, rising from the waters. We will rebuild the Bund better than before, he said. He squinted at me. Are you an engineer? A designer?

I shook my head. A historian. He snorted. Fascinating subject. Useless, but fascinating. Another wave crashed at the base of the tower. The structure creaked. People screamed.

But I knew it would be all right. We're looking for stories that basically show us people overcoming obstacles. And that's it. We're not a Pollyanna-ish magazine. It's not like you read these stories and it's like, oh, everything worked out really happy and everybody was fine. And, you know, look how bright things are. You know, we want to be realistic about showing dire challenges. But the one thing that we always want is to show that people and communities can overcome those challenges, that you don't wait for government to save you. You don't, you know, wait for the hero. I would rather see a story about a couple people or a community solving a problem than, oh, there's the guy or girl who, you know, goes and slays the evil and we're all fine now. It's like everybody works together to make a better future.

That is a good description of the story that Serena Ulibarri had published in the magazine. of the story that Serena Ulibarri had published in the magazine. My story in Dream Forge called The Spiral Ranch is set in a futuristic Austin, Texas, where there is a skyscraper with a spiral pasture that they raise dwarf cows in this skyscraper in the middle of the city. She was actually inspired by a work of conceptual architecture that she saw in a design contest. The image was of an open-air spiral farm slash skyscraper. And, you know, I didn't know if it was realistic, but I thought I could tell a story in this setting. So I started thinking, who works there? You know, who runs this place? And then the characters, the idea kind of grew from

that. In her story, two friends who work at the Spiral Ranch discovered that their cattle are being stolen by rustlers using giant drones to snatch the cows away. Piper tore down the staircase four steps at a time, slamming the doors open at each pasture as she passed them. She had no plan, she just knew this was her herd, and she would be damned if she let them be carted off into the forest. All the pastures that were supposed to have cattle were fine until pasture three. It was empty, and the gate leading down to pasture two hung off its hinges. Eventually, Piper finds the cattle rustlers and tries to stall them before they can get away.

Why are you doing this? Cows ain't supposed to live in skyscrapers. We just want to bring agriculture back to the land, back to the people. By stealing our cattle. The way I see it, we're liberating them, Max said. You know, we could use someone with your expertise. Pretty impressive, the way you hacked that drone. You could join us.

He stepped backward. She was the one with her back to the wall, and he had only a few steps to make it to the trailer. Could she actually pull the trigger if he made a run for it? Piper had no way to know if any help was on the way. We want the same thing you want, Mac said. No, she told him. The spiral ranch may not be the best way, but we can't go back to the old ways either. The land has to heal, regrow. He took another step back. That's just propaganda and you know it. She stepped forward, closing the distance between them.

Someday, maybe people would spread out. Start living horizontally again instead of vertically. But right now was a fallow time. Let's go, man! Mullet yelled. He herded the last two cows into the trailer and latched the gate. I can't let you take our cattle, Piper said. Well, then I'd say we are at an impasse. Mac cocked the gun.

The premise of that story sounds futuristic, but as Serena likes to point out, most of the technology in Solarpunk is available now if we want to use it. And it doesn't have to be something huge like a skyscraper farm. We can be Solar Punk in the smaller choices we make. In fact, she thinks the current crisis is already changing people's behavior. You know what, I've seen a fair number of people talk about starting like backyard gardens or, you know, showing their little windowsill, you know, seedlings and such. And they're doing it as a reaction to this and realizing that they can't just go to the store all the time. So I think that's something, a little solar punk that's coming out of this as well.

As Keisha Howard has been sheltering in place, she's also been thinking about how she can make her life more DIY. She's also been thinking about how she can make her life more DIY. Right now, one of the things I decided to do this year is not just to make some of my own clothes, something I never really thought I would just be doing, but fast fashion is terrible for the environment. So what if I just made my own clothes or never bought anything new? And solarpunk clothes could look just as cool as steampunk or cyberpunk fashion, except it would be more practical.

You know, what are some of the natural ways people can make clothing? And it's like natural materials, a lot more colorful than what you see in normal, like sort of cyberpunk aesthetics, a lot more full of life and like earthy, you know, sort of tone. So where it's like cyberpunk, you're thinking of like blacks and purples and blues and neons and that kind of thing. Solar punk is like greens and yellows and grays and like browns. It's really pretty. It's really like earthy and natural feeling when you look at solar punk aesthetic. We are living in a time when even going to the grocery store feels dystopian. And I know for some people it helps to lean into that fear, watching movies about pandemics or reading novels about post-apocalyptic landscapes. I feel the opposite. I've been craving not just hopeful stories,

but hopeful stories about the future. That's why Solarpunk is my sci-fi comfort food right now. And it's healthy comfort food. And what I like about Solarpunk is that it's not necessarily a utopia. At the very least, they just want to imagine a future where solarpunk ideas have a fighting chance, where people can lead by example, even on a small scale,

where there's a lot of power in a hashtag. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Scott and Jay Knoll, Serena Ulibarri, Adam Flynn, Keisha Howard, and Vanessa Bello. In the show notes, I have links to Dreamforge magazine, Serena's anthology Glass and Gardens, Adam Flynn's Solar Punk Manifesto, and Keisha Howard's nonprofit organization, Sugar Gamers. I also have a slideshow of some of the artwork I discussed on the Imaginary World's Instagram page. Now, one of the established authors who has been retroactively deemed solar punk is Kim Stanley Robinson. Apparently, he's quite happy to learn that he had been a solar punk writer all along.

And if you'd like to know more about his work, I interviewed him in a 2017 episode about a novel he wrote called New York 2140, which imagines how New Yorkers would adapt if their city was flooded like Venice. It's a very positive vision of people coming together and life going on. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted emalinski and Imagine World's pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout-out on social media. That always helps people discover the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get free Imaginary Worlds stickers,

mug, t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.