Introduction: Hope Through Action—Solarpunk Blueprints, Desires, and Politics

What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” the feature article of this CRITICAL FORUM on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk’s “dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope,” the way that it couples scrutiny of historical material conditions with the insistence that other ways of living, other social formations, remain possible. Solarpunk dedicates itself to action; it wants to incite political action, of course, but also the more general action of building sustainable infrastructure for the future.1 As Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wagner put it in one of the first solarpunk story collections, “Solarpunk emphasizes innovative interaction with both our communities and our environment; socio-environmental thought and creation, rather than merely survival in a decaying world, inspire the solarpunk attitude” (9). But for attitude to become action, for hope to become change, there must be desire. Weik von Mossner draws on utopian studies scholarship by the likes of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, and Tom Moylan to argue for solarpunk as an education in desire, a school in which readers learn to desire differently, to desire something different from the status quo. This pursuit requires an analysis of storytelling as an effective practice, that is, attention to how narrative form acts on readers, provokes affective reorientations, incites action off the page through representations on the page. For Weik von Mossner, such analysis means turning to the discipline of cognitive narratology, so that the transformation of readers is less the hypothetical postulate of literary criticism, more the material aim of literary activism. Ultimately, Weik von Mossner offers up solarpunk as a lesson in the value of fiction for enabling utopian desire: “I believe we need fiction, too—stories that jump off from those real-world efforts [sustainability projects and non-fiction accounts of them] or go way beyond them, not least because that is how ideas take shape and because it helps those who enjoy it to maintain their sanity.”Solarpunk emerges as a science fiction subgenre in the 2010s, first in Brazil, then in the United States and elsewhere. However, before it became a written genre, solarpunk was a Tumblr and Reddit aesthetic, a set of visual art styles implicitly cultivating the hope that humans might respond to environmental devastation in a positive and productive manner. As Tobias Skiveren explains, in the first response to Weik von Mossner’s piece, solarpunk “emerged not to name an existing body of fiction, but to describe a certain type of fiction that would hopefully at some point be written.” Solarpunk began as a collection of images of sustainable futures; it started as a strategy for visualizing the future of climate change beyond the dominant terms set by apocalyptic and dystopian imaginaries. That these images retroactively became placeholders for theoretically sophisticated fictions shouldn’t make us lose sight of these visual origins. Skiveren argues that we shouldn’t assume (as utopian studies is sometimes wont to do) that desire is the essence of utopianism, that images of the future are incidental to some more fundamental impulse to want more than what’s on offer in the present. Blueprints are important, too. Solarpunk’s representations of a future in which civilization and nature have reconciled don’t simply inspire hope, they function as models. “Solarpunks are indeed very occupied with utopia as real programs for more habitable worlds.” Skiveren frames such programs as part of a more general idea of “utopian literacy,” “the ability to imagine a habitable world beyond our current socio-ecological disasters as well as the routes to get there.” How might solarpunk not only exemplify the prospects of utopian literacy but serve as a concrete means for teaching our students to imagine and enact sustainable futures?Solarpunk’s value involves not only cultivating desire and hope but also modeling alternative futures. It’s mimetic and speculative, as well as affective and libidinal. But what about the “punk” in “solarpunk”? In “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction,” Lee Konstantinou (2019) worries that the proliferation of the “punk” suffix in speculative fiction has become, at best, a marketing effort, publishers carving out new niches for fiction consumption, at worst, a hopeless attempt to catch the lightning in a bottle that was cyberpunk, devoid of social or political substance. The occasion for Konstantinou’s article is hopepunk, but he also cites “steampunk, biopunk, nanopunk, stonepunk, clockpunk, rococopunk, raypunk, nowpunk, atompunk, mannerpunk, salvagepunk, Trumppunk, solarpunk, and sharkpunk (no joke!), among others.” These subgenres are the nostalgic efflux of a genre system turning in on itself, cannibalizing its own powers for the sake of replication instead of innovation (let alone social change): “All of these strategies can produce terrific stories. But none seems capable of generating the sort of excitement cyberpunk once did, and none has done much better than cyberpunk at the job of imagining genuinely different human futures. [. . .] If the best you can do is worm your way through gleaming arcologies you played little part in building—if your answer to dystopia is to develop some new anti-authoritarian style, attitude, or ethos—you might as well give up the game, don your mirrorshades, and admit you’re still doing cyberpunk (close to four decades later)” (Konstantinou). Konstantinou’s criticism of science-fiction’s “punk”-fetish suggests what might make solarpunk different, namely, its commitment to community action, its insistence on the collective construction of futures. In Phoebe Wagner’s response to Weik von Mossner, they defend “the ‘punk’ aspect of solarpunk because it provides one answer to this question. Punk music and culture—with all its problems—has also created an ethic of community care. Punk balances the idea-driven manifestos of the music with community action, whereas solarpunk struggles to find this balance.” Maintaining this punk ethos, Wagner reminds, means not getting too caught up in the bucolic dimension of solarpunk: “If gardens are the most attractive aspect of solarpunk [. . .] then we are not going far enough.” It means staying true to the solarpunk proposition of “hope through action,” of fostering the genre’s will to be “more than entertainment but possibility”: “A solarpunk story turns hope into action for community adaptation. A tall order for storytellers, yes, but there is joy found in setting out for such vital work.”Solarpunk brings pleasure. It alleviates the miserable feelings that come from the apocalyptic and dystopian parameters of contemporary culture. At the same time, solarpunk doesn’t ignore the magnitude of the social and ecological crises that define our present. Solarpunk stories “typically critique capitalism indirectly, portraying a world attempting to heal from wounds it has left on its people and its landscape,” but that indirect reckoning with capitalism (and, one might add, settler colonialism and petromodernity) is fundamental to the genre’s hopeful efforts (Sage xi). The final response to Weik von Mossner, by Christian Haines, recuperates the question of desire, reintroducing the psychoanalytical and historical material economies of want. Haines argues that what “makes solarpunk valuable for the social and political imagination—what makes it properly utopian—is its commitment to working through history. [. . .] Utopianism requires the pain of history; it entails friction and frustration as much as satisfaction.” Such pain and frustration motivates the narratives of solarpunk, tying positive images of the future back to the ongoing wreckage of the present. It does so not in order to foreclose hope through action but to reframe that ethos through the logics of fantasy and of the death drive. Solarpunk, Haines contends, fantasizes sustainable futures not by avoiding our attachments to fossil-fueled capitalism but by tarrying with the limits and the ruins of petromodernity. Solarpunk thus responds to Fredric Jameson’s well-known thesis that science fiction thrives on failure, that its “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full representations that prove on closer inspection to be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference” (Jameson 288–89). It responds to this thesis with a “yes, but”: yes, solarpunk indexes the difficulty of overcoming petromodernity, of dreaming up futures beyond the Anthropocene, but with its drawing of blueprints, its education of desire, and its commitment to action, it turns speculative meditation on the poverty of the present into something positive: praxis as the shuttle between theory and practice, fiction and reality; critique as the building of worthwhile futures—hope through action.