I hope you are the right community to bounce some ideas of.
Lately I pondered on the thought that solarpunk is missing a single book that represents the movement and the genre. I've seen people pointing to A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Always coming Home (Le Guin), but take fantasy for example:
Undoubtedly, LOTR is the single monolith everyone points to and reading LOTR will give you an (outdated) gist of what the genre is about. Its story takes place in a world which was created to facilitate as context for a constructed language.
Or take scifi. There are many works which are widely considered to be classic scifi. My example would be The Left of Darkness, a novel using a fictional setting to test an idea (What if gender was weird) and especially reflect on our current understanding of the idea when comparing our world to the fictional. I will argue that this is the core of scifi.
Now solarpunk. Did I miss a work that is the definition of solarpunk and generally considered to be a good example?
If not, what would be the process / method used to write the solarpunk book? Solarpunk is grass root, anti-authority, community and action. In my view, this does not combine well with the idea of a single author representing the genre, like our JRR Tolkien the grandfather of fantasy. Following this idea, I wondered if the classic solarpunk novel would not be written by a single person, but a group of people contributing to a shared story. Collaborative Fiction is the key word. This would enable collecting the perspectives of marginalized people from different places from the world to contribute. It would not seem right to me, that a single european/US guy writes the whole thing. Maybe it even would not be written in english?
So my second question: Do you know any collaborative fiction works associated with solarpunk? Or any big ones at all?
The Wikipedia page on Collaborative Fiction mentions one project I want to highlight: A Million Penguins. They set up the Mediawiki instance and allowed everybody to edit the manuscript just like Wikipedia. It kind of went wrong because of trolling people and a lack of a shared vision, But maybe this is something that could work given the right circumstances? Maybe a change request process would fit better, similar to how open source developers accept code from strangers with pull request.
Such a project would need some oversight of course, but a part of me believes that solarpunks are alike enough that we have a shared vision that we can distill into a single story, much like Wikipedia pages converge on the truth because people are more passionate to correcting things than to destroy them.
tl;dr: What do you think about the idea of a collaborative solarpunk novel as a classic of the genre?
Sorry, if this does not fit your community. I just thought some of you might have an opinion.