Solarpunk fiction is a form of climate fiction, but by focusing on the changes we could make, it can move us past climate anxiety, says author and editor Sarena Ulibarri. She introduces us to five favourites: ranging from near-future to far-future, they present a collection of thought experiments in the ways humanity might yet choose to live.
Curiously, all white American authors. I wonder why this keeps happening.
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.
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.
That’s certainly not ideal. Do you have any recommendations ?
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.