genre – Words Deferred

Solarpunk 101

The term “solarpunk” has been on my radar for a couple years: a fuzzy idea of a genre that has ecology and climate change near its center, and the overused “-punk” suffix that we can no longer trust to have much real meaning.

When I finally picked up an actual solarpunk anthology at my local Half-Price Books, the introduction sent me spiraling down an Internet rabbit hole. I found myself with 30 tabs of solarpunk open, at least that many already combed through, and a small pile of dead links and dead ends.

The term solarpunk is now more than a decade old, but it still exists in the periphery, the outskirts and wild country of sci-fi, futurism, fashion, and politics. It may be a short-lived idea that never achieves critical mass. Only time will tell if it’s something that has actually taken root and begun to grow.

As evidence of this tenuous position, I submit most articles, posts, and papers that mention solarpunk. The vast majority are just like this one: explanations that attempt to answer “What is it, really?”

And yet, there is a cult following. Among this small cohort, there is clearly a hunger for more of this genre and aesthetic. There appears to be a demand that far outstrips the supply (a couple anthologies, small online magazines, and a smattering of discourse).

I’d love to talk about where solarpunk might go, and how it can grow and gain traction. But I’ll have to save that for later posts. First, I have to start where everyone starts. What is solarpunk?

Origins

The first piece of Solarpunk literature generally cited is Solarpunk: Historias Ecologicas e Fantasticas em um Mundo Sustentavel—a 2013 Brazilian anthology, first published in English in 2018.

Another widely cited early work is a Tumblr post that popularized the term on that platform. The tag now has 20k followers.

Solarpunk – Notes Toward a Manifesto is a somewhat more academic treatment of the nascent movement and the ideas that influence it.

The Aesthetics of Solarpunk

There aren’t any. Not really.

Well, okay, that’s just my personal position. Others will disagree.

There aren’t any. Not really. This is my position. Others will disagree.

Plants and nature have an obvious place in it. Stained glass and art nouveau have been proposed as a component. Reclaimed and recycled materials, decomposable and natural materials; metal, glass, fabric, stone and wood. Less plastic. Or the polar opposite of Apple’s design philosophies.

A fair amount of ink has been spilled trying to corral an aesthetic, but these attempts often come at it from the wrong direction. You can’t start with an aesthetic and then back into a genre from there. The recognizable elements of cyberpunk and steampunk were distilled from many examples of those genres.

I’d argue that there simply aren’t enough popular examples of solarpunk to achieve the critical mass needed for generally agreed-upon aesthetics to emerge. That’s okay. It’s exciting. The field is still wide open, and resonant ideas still have a chance to shape what the genre might become.

The Politics of Solarpunk

If the “punk” in cyberpunk and steampunk ever held any political connotations, I would argue that they have long been ground down and worn out. The philosophy of cyberpunk is largely nihilistic: a wildly unequal world full of wealth disparity, desperation, and hopelessness, where the unification of corporate greed and governmental control has made the rich practically unassailable. If I were a cynic, I might say it’s a slightly grimier, neon-lighted version of the world we appear to be living in.

The politics of steampunk is anachronistic Victorian British, which isn’t much better.

Solarpunk might have more right to claim “punk” than its older siblings. It has an inherently political core: a belief that the average Joe has the duty to fight back against the status quo, that the system dominated by corporatism, greed, indifference to human rights, and ecological catastrophe must be overthrown. It’s a belief in individualism and self-sufficiency, but also in local small communities, human- and environmentally-conscious economics, and grassroots support systems.

This is a modern twist on the original punk movement of the 70s and 80s, strongly anti-authority and inherently suspicious of both government and corporatism. Wild and chaotic, but also joyful in a way that only people living on the edge of desperation can be.

Solarpunk currently has a streak of willful nonviolence (at least toward people). This, perhaps, runs contrary to the punk ethos that if The Man is going to push you down, you had better go down swinging, and knock some of his teeth out along the way. I suspect there might be a real audience for a rougher, more violent strain of eco-fiction like this, but I’m not sure it could call itself solarpunk.

The Challenges of Writing Solarpunk

The first challenge, as you might already suspect, is trying to define the boundaries of the genre and writing within them. Solarpunk invites you to choose your own adventure, and then find out whether others think you’ve hit the mark.

The second, and much bigger problem, I feel, is that solarpunk strives for a utopic vision, and utopias are dangerously boring. Nobody wants to read a story where all the challenges and difficulties have been smoothed out. That’s why so many utopias turn out to be dystopias once the protagonist discovers a few nasty truths.

Luckily, the road to utopia is rough, and there are plenty of solarpunk stories to be told along the way. I see the best place for solarpunk stories living in the time between the present and some glorious, distant future.

That brings us to the third challenge: imagining solutions to very hard, very real problems. We don’t live in a solarpunk utopia today because there are daunting technological, societal, political, and economic challenges that prevent it. Those conflicts and tensions are fertile ground for stories, but they also require some serious thought about how we should try to overcome them.

The soft sci-fi of technobabble problems and technobabble solutions don’t work well here. The readers of today are all too familiar with climate change, oligopoly, and enshittification. A story that proposes half-hearted or unrealistic solutions to these modern woes will fall flat. It’s not easy to imagine solutions (or even battle tactics) that feel plausible. And yet, this is one of the great delights of science fiction, and a reason why the genre continues to inspire the real future. People use stories to make sense of the world.

Future Positive

I hope this brief introduction has whet your appetite for more. Although it’s young, solarpunk strikes me as a genre that is shockingly well-suited to the current moment. We don’t need the nihilism of cyberpunk or the escapist fantasy of steampunk. We need something grounded and fighting mad.

Solarpunk takes the energy and anti-authority attitude of classic punk, and marries it with determined optimism and ethical technology. It is a rebuttal to the world outside the window, and an opportunity to imagine better futures.

Three Things I Learned from Glass Onion

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the second movie in this loosely-connected series, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Although they share the character of Benoit Blanc, the world-famous detective, Glass Onion’s story is completely independent.

Glass Onion follows a group of colorful characters who are invited by their tech billionaire friend to a vacation on his private island. He hosts a murder mystery party where people start dying for real.

Good Parody Has to be Good First

Glass Onion is a parody of the classic murder mystery in many ways. It features tropes like a world-famous detective, a murder mystery party that turns to real murder, a secret twin, a shooting by a gloved hand from just off-screen, and a bullet stopped by an item in a breast pocket.

It also features silliness like a voice shouting “dong” across the island instead of a proper bell, an unexplained dudebro who intrudes in random scenes, Jeremy Renner’s homemade hot sauce, and a rich-guy exercise app that features famous sports figures “on the clock” in a constant live stream, waiting for the rich guy to exercise.

However, all of the tropes and silliness are layered into a well-executed mystery, with a cast of interesting and potentially murderous characters, whose motives and backgrounds come out in a series of reveals that each change our perception of the story.

The titular glass onion is the top room of the billionaire mansion, but also the structure of the story, called out within the dialogue as a metaphor for a mystery where all the layered complications are distractions, and the real answer was obvious all along.

In short, a really good parody must understand exactly what it is parodying. It has to be a good example of the conventional in order to call out the absurd aspects of a genre.

Genre is 50% Superficial

Many of the parts of Glass Onion that feel most like a classic mystery are simple visuals: the entrance and pose of the femme fatale when she first appears, or the sweep of the island’s lighthouse light through the mansion windows after the power goes out.

These things aren’t vital to the story, but they’re visually stunning and they do a tremendous amount of work to set the mood. This is an important lesson for genre writers, many of whom tend to favor plot or characterization over authorial voice and lyricism. It’s good to remember that stylized writing can pull the reader into the story just as effectively as brilliant world-building or dialogue. Ideally, we provide a healthy mix of both.

Bring the Audience Into the Story

The movie came out in 2022, with a brief theatrical release followed by Netflix. It is set in the height of the pandemic, and as it introduces the characters, it also smartly roots the world in its time and place.

We meet the politician taking TV news interviews from her living room, the scientist on a Zoom call at work, the self-centered fashionista hosting a huge unmasked house party, and the “manoshpere” influencer streaming from the house where he lives with his girlfriend and mom. The famous detective, Benoit Blanc, is in the tub, slowly losing his mind out of boredom and losing a game of Among Us with a bunch of celebrities. The bathroom is full of liquor bottles and piles of books.

The cast spends a bit of time solving their puzzle-box invitations to the murder mystery island vacation, revealing little tidbits of who they are before we jump to the luxury yacht trip from the Greek mainland to the island where the remainder of the movie will take place. The characters are given a mysterious concoction that is implied (but not outright stated) to protect them from Covid, and this is the last we see of the masks and social distancing.

What’s interesting about this first half of the first act is that it chooses to start in the midst of the pandemic, even though it has little bearing on the remainder of the movie. It could have done what many movies did, and simply ignored the plague times altogether. Instead, we start in a very relatable (maybe too relatable) time and place, and the movie brings us along into its fantastic world of ultra-wealth and murder.

Easing the audience gently into an unfamiliar world is common in fantasy and science fiction, where the world of the story is often very different from the world we live in. However, Johnson shows that it can be equally effective in a modern mystery story that takes place in a world very similar to ours.

A Mystery Worth Emulating

I really enjoyed Glass Onion. It’s the kind of movie that rewards re-watching, not just to notice all the clever clues hidden throughout, but to study the intricate layering of structural elements. Rian Johnson is frankly showing off. If you’re looking for a great study in constructing a mystery, this is a modern masterpiece of a classic genre.

Reblog: On “Prose-Forward” Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations — Lincoln Michael

Good Lord, Lincoln Michael is a treasure. He lives with one foot in genre fiction and one foot in literary fiction, and he’s erudite enough to use that vantage point to illuminate the literary landscape.

Every time I read one of his Substack articles, I come away with five tabs open for further reading, and a whole new vocabulary to describe topics that I had vague ideas about, and which he has described with exacting precision.

In this post, Michael suggests that the common discussion of “invisible vs. visible” prose is shallow, and Max Gladstone’s tension between “textured and aerodynamic” prose adds to the conversation. He follows that up with a discussion of yet more theoretical axes for comparing fiction: plot-forward and prose-forward.

As an author who is published about equally in the SFF ecosystem and literary fiction ecosystem, this is a topic I think about a lot. It’s very easy to say “all these labels are false and mean nothing!” And obviously as someone who writes both SFF and “literary fiction” I think the binary is bullshit, the snobs on both sides are annoying, and all of these terms are fluid, overlapping, and spectrums. Etc. At the same time, questions of what gets called literary and what is embraced or rejected by SFF readers is a practical concern. Saying “it’s all bullshit” or “it’s all just marketing” doesn’t change the hard reality of where your work gets published, whether you have shots at awards, and how readers will find or fail to find your work.

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I often hear SFF people ask why some speculative writers are embraced by the literary world and others aren’t. I think “prose-forward” is much of the answer. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that “prose-forward” writing is the defining quality of what is called “literary” in general. (Note that in my view authors can be simultaneously literary and genre. This is a Venn diagram, not a binary.)

Prose-forward doesn’t mean a specific style but rather that the prose itself is an integral part of the work. The texture of it, to use Gladstone’s metaphor. That texture might be dense and lush like Southern Gothic or gritty and minimalist like dirty realism or a million other things. But the literary world places great focus on the texture of sentences, whatever that texture might be.

I’m a big fan of anyone who can get past the supposed binaries that people love to define for these kinds of topics, and Michael is great at sussing out those details and making me want to dig deeper.

Tag: genre