I was just about to make a post about The Word for World is Forest! I just finished it and I'm still thinking about the last lines.

honestly I'm not a super hero person (Marvel has done a lot to dumb down the genre into something that serves the status quo) but the latest Superman movie had a big impact on me and I think, yeah, Superman is solarpunk

Yeah, I generally approach superheroes with a bit of caution and it's not usually the type of fiction I favor but seemed worth considering, especially with the community being a little dormant.

Thank you! SLRPNK has definitely changed and grown a lot since I first joined as I'm sure you remember and that wouldn't be possible without the hard work of you and the other admins, moderators, and instance members who have made it such a great source for information and discussion.

Well, no reason to stop swearing then, either. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Superman is maybe not the role model most Solarpunks think of first, but thanks for sharing (I almost forgot I opened this community a long time ago).

Happy 4th cake-day btw. 🎂

I haven't read the whole global corpus yet, but two of my favourite authors are Renan Bernardo from Brazil and Wole Talabi from Nigeria (the latter writes more scifi, but has some interesting solarpunk-adjacent stories).

In general, it's much, much harder to find authors from the Global South because USians have such an easier time not only promoting themselves to editors & publishers, but also reaching their audiences.

Paulo Baciagalupi is also worth looking into, his book The Water Knife is not explicitly solarpunk either but does deal with resource scarcity and the maladaptations a capitalst world will make to it. He has an excellent short story in the book Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology called The Calorie Man which is in the same vein. That is an amazing book on it's own, there are a number of excellent stories included.

Unfortunately I don't know if I've come across any books with the inherent hopefulness of solarpunk, but I would love to read them.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is native american. She was added shortly after you posted this though. I'd recommend Nnedi Okorafor but she is Afrofuturist/SF and not solarpunk per-se . There are parts of her stories that hold with the solarpunk ethos.

That's certainly not ideal. Do you have any recommendations ?

It could, that's a good observation. I thought about sharing it to the Lunarpunk community but the two genres are so inextricably linked in terms of fiction that it can be hard to pinpoint a distinct dividing line between them. The other mod in that community and I were both just mentioning the possibilities that still remain in Lunarpunk as it's still a nascent subgenre and aesthetic so I wouldn't rule it out. With Lunarpunk's tendency to be more introspective and spiritual that could match with Noir's existentialism and fatalism although its iconography would probably look a bit different and need an update.

No mention of anything by Becky Chambers?
I mean, she mostly writes novellas, but her writing practically defines solarpunk/hopepunk.

If anyone is interested in non-fiction solarpunk, I recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and How to Love a Forest by Ethan Tapper. I feel both are closer to long form poetry than novels. But they very much carry the solarpunk vibe and contain a call to practice.

Curiously, all white American authors. I wonder why this keeps happening.

I actually DNF’d A Half Built Garden recently but am excited to try some of the others! If Half Built gets really good after chapter 8 someone give me a shout.

Currently reading Newitz’ The Terraformers which has some solar punk vibes

That's an imprtant novel, too. It's worth noting that Sarena Ulibarri stated on Mastodon :

I'm never so bold as to claim that the things I enjoy are objectively "the best," but Five Books asked me for a list of #solarpunk books I recommend, so I listed five I think more people should read.

I'm glad you liked it. I thought it was a great list as it shows the diversity of stories that are possible within Solarpunk. You can follow Sarena Ulibarri on Mastodon or other parts of the Fediverse. Although she didn't mention Lemmy in the article she is aware of this community. @AEMarling@slrpnk.net is an active member on this instance, of course and Brightflame stated she is donating all royalties for The Working to climate justice organizations if that's incentive to read it.

+1 Just finished that book, so good. First half was bleak,

Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

Saving, thanks

Seems like it may fall more under lunarpunk?

There is definitly the potential of "dark" Solarpunk stories set in the nearish future aka "it's going to get worse, before it gets better". Climate refugee settlements (slums) would be probably the perfect setting.

The Great Transition: A Novel by Nick Fuller Googins fits this mold, and is just a good book in the process. It takes place some twenty years after the worst of the climate crisis, with extensive flashbacks to the worst of it, and doesn't sugarcoat either the work it's going to take to get to a sustainable society or the problems such a society might have.

The bigger issue I see is the cop/detective trope that probably needs a lot of deconstruction to not come accross as hopelessly anachronistic in a Solarpunk story.

How so? I mean, I can see how a solarpunk setting might not have cops or criminals in the capitalist sense, but it would still have justice and injustice, people trying to hide injustice and people trying to bring injustice to light. Make one of the latter your protagonist and you have a detective story.

I think Murder in The Tool Library did the detective thing well by making it a (vetted and qualified) croudsourced sort of thing. Sort of like a good version of the Vidoq society. This helped make the investigation more of a community thing. I'd be interested to see how else you could do it.

There is definitly the potential of "dark" Solarpunk stories set in the nearish future aka "it's going to get worse, before it gets better". Climate refugee settlements (slums) would be probably the perfect setting.

The bigger issue I see is the cop/detective trope that probably needs a lot of deconstruction to not come accross as hopelessly anachronistic in a Solarpunk story.

Finished! I liked it a lot, not for the story as I felt it really was targeted at the young adult male (which I no longer identify with in afraid), but for the ideas and some of the values. And the vision as well - of what will happen, and what might happen.

Ah, that's a bit disappoing to hear but I'll take your word for it and it seem to be consistent with what people are saying in reviews. I'll give it a shot but it doesn't sound like a big page turner so I don't know if can finish it by the 25th.