At some point in the 2000s, people started to realize all that crappy stuff predicted by the near future dystopian science fiction genre of cyberpunk was starting to come true. People began to think collectively that maybe instead of all this digital panopticon stuff, we can try to manifest something nice instead. As an intentional contrast to cyberpunk, people started to rally around the idea of solarpunk as a positive vision of a beautiful, green energy-based society.
There is good solarpunk media, but the genre often falls into a few traps, which I believe are holding it back from achieving its goals of imagining and manifesting a better tomorrow. Its main pitfall is that of toxic positivism. It looks to create a cozy escapism, which is understandable, but that doesn't imagine better future worlds. Our imagined utopias can't be in conflict with our assumptions about the world, so they just reproduce it without challenging it. It slaps trees on skyscrapers instead of wondering how society might have to change to get into ecological balance. It isn't looking to imagine new ways of living outside the capitalist mode of production.
This is why I think a lot of the best solarpunk doesn't really fall under the solarpunk umbrella but is more just an inspiration or is adjacent. Even Psalm for the Wild Built, the classic solarpunk novel, exists at the edge of utopia, and overlooks the impossible gulf between humans and robots. Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke contain devastating effects of civilization on nature. Red Mars is about class war, not living in utopia.
Donna Haraway, future theorist, argues that conflict is inherent in society and that a peaceful utopia cannot exist. She writes, “Sex is a constraint on the formation of societies because sexually reproducing individuals are not identical genetically. They therefore compete with different investment strategies… any society with most of its members engaging in sexual reproduction cannot hope for real peace.” The alternative being a laboratory-controlled society where individuals are created to fit into an authoritarian social structure. Their peace would be the result of total loss of freedom.
Science fiction that imagines a better future doesn't imagine a world without conflict, it imagines what new conflicts will be there, or what conflicts that exist today have taken new form in the future.
Haraway also writes quite a lot about cyborgs, sometimes positioning them as an archetype of the people of the future. They challenge our ideas of humanity and their world, rejecting the boundaries around our ideas of humanity, both draw closer to animals and machines. Individuals can be chimerical and contain permanent contradiction instead of needing to be rigidly and homogeneously defined.
A better future world that exists in harmony with nature celebrates human genius and our power of creation. That world accesses a deep cultural and ecological wisdom while always looking to create new things and see things in new ways. A communistic society that relies on the power of educated masses to prevent exploitation and be vigilant for the ever-present threat of fascism that threatens the world.
The Weird Hope blog post inspired this post, and it related to a lot of these ideas. It takes a dark setting but injects it with light. It features characters who are becoming something beyond human to adapt to a world changed by humans. What I want when I think of a sci-fi for a better future is one that doesn't block out the uglier sides of humanity but thinks of more effective ways of addressing them. I don't want shiny solar panels on my cottage, I want to build a new world in the shell of the old.