Sunvault: the first English anthology to collect solarpunk writing

August 29, 2017 6:28 PM

Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation is the first English language anthology* to broadly collect solarpunk, "a fundamentally hopeful new genre" that "envisions a future of green, sustainable energy used by societies that value inclusiveness, cooperation, and personal freedom." The included short stories, poems and artwork are almost entirely exclusive works that were submitted by authors and artists from around the world, depicting various glimmers and glows of hope for the near-to-far future. You can find snippets of art and text in this collection of promo material, and links to other works below the break. [via mefi projects]

Every story and poem in this optimistic illustrated anthology of “solarpunk and eco-speculation” portrays a future in which environmental disaster is encroaching on or encompassing our world, but a glimmer of hope remains. A job university applicant in T.X. Watson’s “The Boston Hearth Project” explains how a so-called terrorist can be an otherwise helpless group’s salvation. In Tyler Young’s “Last Chance,” people go to extremes to teach children how to keep from ruining their world, even when one of those children is dying. The title character of Camille Meyers’s “Solar Child” is four-year-old Ella, who partially sustains herself through photosynthesis; she is threatened by religious zealots who oppose the genetic modification that gave her this ability.

~ An excerpt of the review in Publisher's Weekly

The anthology is almost exclusively original work, but you can find personal websites/pages or other works by the authors and artists linked below, with creators sorted into categories of what they have in the anthology. But first, here's the forward: Andrew Dincher - “On the Origins of Solarpunk”

Short stories
T.X. Watson - "The Boston Hearth Project" (Project website, thin at the moment)
Yilun Fan, trans. S. Qiouyi Lu - "Speechless Love" (with a link to Zhou Yunpeng, “Speechless Love”)
C. Samuel Rees - "Teratology" ["Miriam," an unrelated poem]
Iona Sharma - "Eight Cities"
Daniel José Older - "Dust" (online via Lightspeed Magazine)
Santiago Belluco - "The Death of Pax"
Tyler Young [Twitter] - "Last Chance"
Lev Mirov - "The Desert, Blooming"
Karyn L. Stecyk - "The Trees Between"
Kristine Ong Muslim - "Boltzmann Brain"
Lavie Tidhar - "The Road to the Sea" [Lavie, previously, and in Some notable SF/F/H short fiction from 2014]
Jaymee Goh - "The Reset"
Brandon Crilly - "Pop and the CFT"
Jess Barber - "You and Me and the Deep Dark Sea"
Nick Wood - "Thirstlands" (previously published in The World SF Blog in 2011) [Nick Wood, previously, in lists of best sci-fi books]
Camille Meyers - "Solar Child"
Nisi Shawl - "The Colors of Money" (set in the same universe as her novel Everfair) [Nisi, previously with more women authors]
Maura Lydon - "The Herbalist"
A. C. Wise - "A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World"

Poetry
Chloe N. Clark - "Please"
Lisa M. Bradley and José M. Jimenez - "Strandbeest Dreams" (Strandbeests, previously)
Brandon O’Brien - "The Sailor-Boys" (Brandon is also the poetry editor of FIYAH Lit Mag, a magazine of black speculative fiction; and he wrote two pieces for Uncanny Mag)
joel nathanael - "light sail star bound"
Bogi Takács - "Synthesis: This Shining Confluence"
Jack Pevyhouse [Tw] - "Solar Powered Giraffes"
Aleksei Valentín [Tw] - "The Seven Species"
Chloe N. Clark - "Fairy Tales & Other Species of Life"
Bethany Powell - "recursive"
Sara Norja - "Sunharvest Triptych"

Illustrations
Clara Ng - "Hand Over the Future"
Bogi Takács - "Facing the Sun"
Carlin Reynolds - "Radio Silence"
Sireesha Reddy - "Pan, Legs Resting"
Christine Moleski - "Solar Flare"
Leigh Wallace - "Through the Glass"
Likhain - "Her Own Captain"

Bonus links:
- Q&A with the Editors, Phoebe Wagner & Brontë Christopher Wieland
- Solarpunk Press has a few more short stories, 11 posted as text and audio to date, but the project looks like it stalled in Nov. 2016.
-- Solarpunk Press also collected a few manifestos and essays that they felt strongly influenced solarpunk, starting with:
- Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto from Adam Flynn
- Medium.com summary of a loose history of solarpunk, from Solarpunks on Tumblr
* Solarpunk: histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável is a Brazilian anthology from 2014 (Google auto-translation of the article)

A final previously linked post:
- Women in Science Fiction & Fantasy Month, 2015

posted by filthy light thief (13 comments total)

This is lovely and I'm excited to read this. Thank you for sharing and bringing this to my attention. I'll be ordering mine when I get home from work later this evening. Huzzah.
posted by Fizz at 7:17 PM on August 29, 2017

There's also a current Kickstarter campaign to translate Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável from Portuguese into English.
posted by reductiondesign at 7:57 PM on August 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home anticipated this genre about 30 years ago.
posted by misterbee at 12:06 AM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

I am excited by this. Another precursor: Richard Brautigan's All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace.
posted by michaelhoney at 12:52 AM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

misterbee: And Ecotopia as well, of course.
posted by adamgreenfield at 1:15 AM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

So if cyberpunk is when goths discover brown, is solarpunk when goths discover green?
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:21 AM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think cyberpunk is when goths discover meth and trenchcoats.

Steampunk is brown. (Let's just say laudanum.)

Solarpunk is MDMA?
posted by Telf at 2:41 AM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

You know, I was just thinking if we could make a fusion generator that ran off neoNazis/white supremecists/redpillers, it would be a great thing.

Then I sadly realized it would be truly sustainable.
posted by Samizdata at 3:09 AM on August 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Great post, thanks!
posted by zardoz at 4:01 AM on August 30, 2017

This immediately reminded me of an old Patrick Farley comic called "The Jain's Death", which sadly has been UNDER CONSTRUCTION for half a decade.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:36 AM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Another 1985 precursor, Bruce Sterling's "Green Days in Brunei." Written before all the labels, today we would call it a mix of solarpunk and cyberpunk.
posted by seasparrow at 6:39 AM on August 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is amazing. Thanks for the thorough post! [Disclosure: I'm the publisher.]
posted by joannemerriam at 8:07 AM on August 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

This looks great! It seems like the answer to the AskMe question from yesterday about how an SF reader can cheer up when so much current SF is depressing.

If you want more along these lines, check out Future Primitive, a collection edited by Kim Stanley Robinson.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:11 PM on August 30, 2017 [3 favorites]