Solar Punk

That's true, but the pre-cyberpunk age saw a huge amount of utopian science fiction which was incredibly popular. I see this as sort of a return to form. I agree though that it will probably take a while before we figure out how to properly write utopian sci-fi again.
For my part, I think Vernor Vinge has a neat attempt with Rainbows End. It's kind of quasi-utopian but still really quite interesting.

Agreed. It's hard to rebel against something good. But here's my take. When the world was seemingly overjoyed at the huge postwar successes of capitalism, especially in Japan, and the significant advances in technology, there was a cynical response in the form of punk. Cyberpunk in particular took the motifs of global capitalism and advanced tech to its extreme. We live in a pretty pessimistic age now to be honest. Even the people who celebrate capitalism don't seem to celebrate it quite as enthusiastically as they did before. Everyone knows that something is wrong, but many people can't put their finger on it. This solarpunk thing seems to me like an attempt to rebel against pessimism. We're so used to punk being a response to the strange fake happiness of consumerism that we associate punk with that negativity. Personally, I see punk as rebelling against the status quo, whatever form that takes.

Sure, sure, but then make that the story. Not a story as a rebellion, but a story of the rebellion. That's where our imagination fails so far; we can't imagine how or what that rebellion, against our current totalitarian order, would look like.

You're right. Honestly that's why I think this sort of fiction is so important. We need something on which to base our collective imagination of the future. Obviously that won't just be science-fiction, but it's a start. The more we can say with confidence "I have a vision of what the future ought to look like and I can paint that picture" the better off we'll be as a whole.

I agree with this.

A lack of clear vision of what to do once we've won has been the weak point of the left in the past century.

Contrary to , we know exactly what a workers' revolt looks like, but once we win them we tend to just hand it all over to either some middle-class porkys-in-waiting or else to some unimaginative gray blur bureaucrats who just make an authoritarian version of capitalism.

With the exception of zombies, all of those things have been happening quite literally forever and will continue to happen until the resources necessary to sustain them can no longer be acquired.

So far in our history, for the human race, these conditions have been inescapable.
I think this touches on an interesting point as well. This is best-best-case scenario collectivist futurology. It is a, at its core, a form of escapism from a cruel reality.

On the surface, I don't really care what people want to write about. If they want fairytale technofuture then by all means, write to your heart's content. People write fantasy about dragons and orcs and shit, if it makes you happy, go for it.
But at a deeper level, as a literary and social critic, I have to say I find the premise of solarpunk (as I understand it) falling entirely flat for me.
Look at the world that Gibson portrayed in his Sprawl series back in 1984. Corporations control everything, billions of people live in slums under terrible conditions while the rich live in literal satellite cities, and it's only by virtue of an already wealthy/powerful/(and usually morally ambiguous) outside force combined with the skills and extreme desperation of an individual in the face of an entire world trying to exploit them that anyone from the Sprawl is able to become anything more than what they were born as.

This vision was pessimistic in its time, but it was prophetically accurate. That's why the world of Gibson and contemporary cyberpunk (I think) continues to fascinate people. It is just as bleak or a little bit bleaker than our existing reality, but it has new tools to help people even the odds to a slight extent against that adversity.

Contrast that with solarpunk. It represents an optimism that I honestly don't see in the world. I have difficulty imagining how this sort of society could come about on planet Earth in its current condition. Maybe that's my fault.

i.e. materialistic constraints. If you can turn anything into anything, anything is possible!

On one hand, this is sort of similar to Star Trek's future, which is an interesting setting for fiction.
On the other hand, no one is calling Star Trek futurepunk, or any other kind of punk, because it isn't a punk story or a punk world.

This is an interesting claim, though I think it misses the focus on individualism that punk implies within a genre. To go back to the Star Trek point, I've never even considered referring to the space-faring fiction of Gene Roddenberry as 'ExplorerPunk' or 'AlienPunk' or 'WarpPunk' or 'SpacePunk' or anything like that.

This point could be addressed somewhat by writing style, but consider the fact that cyberpunk originally arrived out of noir fiction. It has always been about the gritty stories of individuals within larger societies/cultures/corporations that grind people up and spit out the bones, not really about the plight of one culture against another.

Cont…

This is sounding more and more like idpol: the genre…
You can already modify your body and gender, and you can already have weird sex with folks. I've done all those things, you can too.

Again, we already do this. Try talking to someone over 70 - bonus points if they still haven't figured out how to use a computer. Seriously, go try to explain the history of Pepe the frog and the first Meme War to grandma. We already live in different worlds generationally speaking. Talk to someone who still believes fervently in bronze-age religion. These conflicts aren't new - solarpunk is just providing a fantasy setting to explore them in. Again, the separation of the genre from likely reality only alienates its messaging.

This is, I think, the crux of the vision for solarpunk as I understand it, and it is why I think the genre will never get off its feet. It is techno-paradise daydreaming, not a possible reflection of a future reality.

Again, beautiful on the surface, but not realistic, not gritty, not punk.

Fiction is interesting in that it allows us to imagine different worlds.
However, if you're setting your world in a future version of Earth, you kind of need an explanation of how this new setting came about within the context of the existing world. I think a book about how this society came about within contemporary history would be more engaging than the tale of an individual within this somewhat idealized version of the future.

I want to see how collectivism, authors and thinkers stand up to global capitalism and world order on a planet filled with way too many people with way too many needs to create any kind of new society within the existing global paradigm, not some kid exploring their gender and sexuality with a solar-powered robot within a fairytale future that I can't really see ever coming to fruition.

tl;dr: I don't think it is punk, and I don't think stories within this world would be all that compelling without the grit of reality that solarpunk tries so hard to distance itself from. If I was in the mood for fantasy I'd just read Dragonlance. If I wanted to think about what the future mighty look like within a fictional setting, I'd probably look for a new cyberpunk author. Solarpunk as a genre can exist as a vehicle for the exploration of best-case-scenario future collectivism, but I don't know that this will catch on with anyone who hasn't drunk the futurology koolaid.

Writing hopeful stories of remaking and rebuilding the world and overcoming the problems ecountered on the way is perfectly possible. The problem is that many people think that the end of capitalism somehow means the end of politics and political "conflict" when it means the exact opposite. If you read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez then you might be able to imagine what I mean. I would gladly read more books that mostly deal with the expansion of the collectives(Holons) and the stories of the people that are retaking the world.

I think that this is an interesting way of defining punk, and it may indeed be an accurate definition in most of fiction, but I don't know that we often encounter the status quo (in fiction) as something as ephemeral as a general sense of pessimism about humanity's future.

Damn I wish my copy of the Disposessed was that edition. That's fucking dope.

I take your point I think, but I'd say that what we see is many examples (in speculative fiction) of specific pessimisms about humanity's future. Sure I'll agree that we rarely or never see in fiction a general sense of malaise. I argue that the specific cataclysms and cynicisms in fiction become part of a trend of general malaise. The "punk" in these fictions (I think) is a response to an unthinking optimism about humanity's future which doesn't jive with what they see as reality.
In my view, our society tends to be fairly pessimistic already. Any fiction which sees the future as pessimistic (zombie apocalypse, nuclear holocaust, transhumanist capitalist nightmare etc.) is sort of par for the course. It feeds into our existing sense of where humanity is headed in a way that it didn't when it was new (the dawn of cyberpunk/punk in general). When this pessimism was a response it could genuinely shock people, but now it just kind of confirms what we already tend to believe.
In this context I think punk is a rebellion against pessimism, and that means a genuine optimism and sincerity. Where I think this new punk differs from what old punk was responding to is the unthinkingness of pre-punk optimism. In that way I see new punk as the "negation of the negation" I guess. We know what the problems facing society are, we know how bad things have got, but still we persist in the idea that humanity can do better. That's my thoughts on this new punk; it's a rebellion and a negation of the dominant ideology.

Though there would not be any repressive government or other institution to rebel against, overall dangerous technology falling into the hands of the general public could indeed be the cause of factionalism in such a future, and probably new hierarchies if left unchecked. Then again, that is sorta trespassing into the territory of dystopian fiction. Even then, solarpunk could offer good interstellar-type conflicts with extraterrestrials.

kek

I think I see what you're getting at. What you're saying is that -punk, as a part of any fiction, is essentially rebellion distilled - it is rejection of the norm, no matter the norm.

While I wouldn't say that this is even necessarily incorrect, there is an aspect of this that I think we should examine.

If you were to make a list of the top five most visionary (in the sense that they accurately depicted aspects of the world many years after their publication) works of fiction from the post-WWII world, what would they be? (I am genuinely curious).

In no particular order, the first things that come to my mind are books like Catch-22, 1984, Neuromancer, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451. These books are all quite pessimistic about their outlook for humanity's future, yet they are (to my mind) some of the most accurate in their vision. I think that this is perhaps because when an author examines their own concept of what the future looks like - assuming things will get better (and finding rational explanations to explain why this would be the case in their narrative) is more difficult to explain than assuming that things will slowly get worse. I think that this is an examination of downward trends in human society that is taken to a logical end-point rather than a radical re-imagining of a similar-yet-different society without the same ideological issues as our (or their, in the case of our authors) current society.

I could, perhaps, just be reading too much pessimistic fiction. I am indeed curious as to what you reference as visionary fiction that has a positive vision for humanities future.

solar punk is the most cringe inducing setting possible because the definition of the genre came before any actual works in the genre.

Bruh, that's how a lot of literary genres and movements work. A lot of the time they start with some guy making a lecture or essay reacting to some social conditions or prior literary movement and saying "we should start writing about this."

holy shit dude that's the acid that corrodes visionary thinking

Imagining that anything is possible regardless of the physical constraints imposed by reality is like a capitalist assuming that infinite growth is possible because there are infinite resources available to trade. It is religious thinking, in a sense.

Visionary thinking has to be grounded in reality to truly be truly visionary. Otherwise it is just daydreaming.

I agree, I think most of the great works of speculative fiction of the post-war era have been pessimistic, and accurate. I think part of that pessimism comes, as I've said, from the response to the post-war "American Dream is Real(TM)" happy-go-lucky attitudes of the time. Another part of that pessimism comes, I think, from the systemic dismantling of progressive politics throughout the Western world. Unions got busted up, socialist and communist parties either disappeared or became toothless, etc. The old visions of a better future were being torn away. Of course, the spectre of nuclear holocaust at the time contributed as well.
So in that sense I think you're absolutely right. What I'm referring to as "visionary literature" won't be punk, because the only punk we've known has been cynical. But consider Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series. Obviously a significant work, with a near utopian vision of the future. I'm not saying the vision was a socialist one, but it laid out a potential path for humanity. Similar things could be said of Star Trek for instance. They provided visions of the future, but I'll concede that those visions were woefully inadequate.
The problem with these works, as much as I love them is that their utopianism and optimism seems to us now (and likely seemed at the time) to be ignorant of reality. Nobody really thought we could get to that utopian point. What I think the rebellious nature of punk can offer is a vision that takes inspiration from those earlier utopian works and says "we know that these utopias seem impossible, and in our current framework they are. So we need to negate the framework to make uptopia imaginable again".
I don't know if I'm making any sense at all here, but what I want to get across is that visionary fiction has existed in the past (Asimov and Star Trek just being examples) but couldn't propose a real solution in times when a rational pessimism was not only in vogue, but pretty accurate as well. Now that we've seen the accuracy of our cynical predictions we can use that to create a new idea of the future, one with a path to its conceivability. That's what I think punk allows for. It's rebellious nature lets us show people a path out of the pessimism of the status quo.

This has been an fantastic discussion :)

I do hope to see some nouveau punk fiction coming out in the near future now. Thank you.

I just hope it doesn't get immediately commodified like the rest of punk cultu-

Non-conformity is the new conformity

Ayyy my pleasure comrade. Everything gets commodified, but the spirit of punk is unsellable.

I agree with the comrades that say its a bad setting for fiction. Stories without strive and conflict do not inspire or resonate with us, who live in a world with strive and pain. BUT, it does have potential for art. I am curious what people will draw to fit this genre.

However, I do not understand how any of this is "punk". Cyber punk and diesel punk are extrapolations of unequal societies and a certain technological aesthetic. Cyberpunk is about rebeling in cyberdistopia, steampunk is about rebelling/strife in a more advanced version of early industrial revolution and Victorian England. Solarpunk isnt rebelling at all, since the setting is already good, it is just eco-futurism.

You can call it what you want but that's still basically what communism will be

lmao at the diversity and transgender shit that was snuck into the middle. it sounds lame and uninteresting. i don't see what plot there is to develop in a world where everyone is a boring nerd and there is no culture or conflict. its basically the end of history, a dizzying peek into a post temporal world of non-stop pleasure and deranged celebration. i see nothing but stories about engineering and science projects, sex and interperson faggotry. sounds secular and sterile and void of spirit and life. lame, belongs in the garbage along with Bookchin and all other retard drivel

every time i think of Steam Punk i think of the Sam Hyde video and i can't take it seriously anymore

the universe is expanding and is so large we could never cross it, for all intents and purposes there are unlimited resources to trade and consume. they just require space faring hard ai to get to

Well steampunk is a tad bit silly.

its not just silly

youtu.be/fqdh5r-6bfo

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my god it must suck being that much of uptight autist

Hopium.

The more you research how challenging these tasks would be the less attainable they seem - and that's saying nothing about the geopolitical aspects that would need to be in place for them to even be of any benefit to you or I.

There are materialistic and social considerations about this endeavor that I don't believe you've delved into sufficiently. I would say, and you may perhaps agree, that it is easier for us as humans to believe that we live in a world that will continue progressing forever. That the arc of history bends towards progress and that this is an axiomatic rule of the universe.

I merely point out that this is unlikely to be the case due to our current technological and resource management levels and the bottleneck they create if the system breaks down for any reason.

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lol now you're just shitposting, nothing i said is spooked. artists and art that's contrived is grotesque and has no spirit to it. art that's full of emotion and hope and hatred is living art. you can fuck yourself if you think otherwise. being without morality doesn't mean having bad taste

i was teasing you, i don't actually think infinite consumption is compatible with limited technology nor am i an an-cap. its just funny playing devil's advocate for /liberty/ and Holla Forums especially when im so good at it

The number of people that believe in infinite progress seems to dwarf the number of people who realize that growth has limits. This boggles the mind.

its because of the myth of progress and nietzschean industrialization from the late 19th, early 20th centuries. when you haven't yet destabilize the biosphere or destroyed whole ecosystems yet, its easy to think you can carry on like that indefinitely

This is 100% correct. A lot of what we see in modern futurology has an almost kitsch naivety reminiscent to what we might think of as the hopeful aspirations of future-thinkers back around the turn of the last century would have. Peak oil (diminishing EROEI), climate change, and overpopulation, political instability, destabilized ecosystems, and automation under an uncaring global capitalistic world order are not factors that I think are represented accurately in the minds of our fellow humans when they imagine the future.

I think the reality (and future) that we face is quite grim, comrades.

On the issue of all our future visions being dystopic and therefore optimistic vision being rebellion/punk: not quite. Popular imaginations of the future are dystopic, but not the sound coming out of the mainstream ideologues, the elites. The mainstream.

Silicon valley has a vision of the future that they see as very bright, it is utopian to them. Same for neolibs: America is already great, the world is flat, etc. For NYT-readers, we were progressing towards a better tomorrow before November 8, even if with fits and starts.

I wouldn't mind some neoliberal-punk; punk set in the ideal neoliberal vision of the future. Distinct from cyberpunk which borrowed more from earlier visions.

The difference I see here is that these visions aren't progressive. They aren't visions of what the future could be which recognise the dystopic visions of earlier punk. They're ideals which simply ignore the the fairly pessimistic state of things.
When I talk about the optimistic being punk I mean it in just that way. That for something to be truly optimistic, it needs to be so in spite of the real pessimisms for which it is the counter.

Silicon Valley utopianism doesn't take into account the shitty outcomes of technology over the past 40 years, nor does it recognise the inherent cynicism in its utopian ideals, that corporate dominance is a reality. Cyberpunk predicted it, it's happening now, and Silicon Valley's utopia either ignores it or celebrates it.

Against that backdrop I absolutely think that punk is a true optimism. One which starts from the earlier cynicism, recognises its truth and imagines a positive path for humanity from there.

I'm not saying all literature ought to be dominated by this strand or anything, but that it could be an important part.

Punk is dead

aka vaporwave of punk with "progressive" "green" value

Although punk music fans (not the dirtbags who refer to themselves as punks - actual non human-beings) have been saying that punk is dead since 1978, it actually wasn't proven to be true until 1991 or so - the year "punk" broke in America

Since the early 1990s, punk bands are played on the big rock and top 40 stations in even the most rural areas of the United States. Green Day, for instance, sells as many records as 50 Cent and records on about the same six-million dollar budget in the same lavish studios.

Punk rock is recording a demo on a tape recorder in a trailer and selling copies of the tapes out of the back of your 1973 Ford Galaxy.

Now a fashion trend dominated by white prep school kids and emos.

How can anyone today disagree with the fact that punk is dead and has been for almost 20 years now?

-urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Punk is Dead

Top definition and image when searching 'punk is dead'.

The fact that that capitalism cannibalizes, converts, and capitalizes on even anti-capitalistic movements, I think, lends itself to the pessimistic punk worldview espoused elsewhere in this thread.

Truly capitalism and commodification ruin absolutely everything.

"genre" is dead is one of the dumbest memes out there.
Just because something is not popular anymore in it's original form doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all anymore or that there are no people that do the same now that was done back then.
People for whom it's dead are the people who went into it for the sake of it being cool and hip at the time, and when it's general appearance changed they wanted to justify to themselves the unwillingness to be part of that crowd anymore.
Nobody is stopping anyone now to go into their garage and make punk music even if now there is no more big specific movement to associate with..

disgusting
I want my centralist fully automated luxury gay space communism punk.

Grant Morrison has plenty of highly optimist genre fiction, but to be optimistic you need to frequently refer to the present which the future will be better than, or else there is no conflict, granted he writes superhero stuff where there always something to fight anyways.
You need islands of goodness within a less good world: Morrison actually writes superman as even more moral and powerful than the norm, but it works because he is shown effectively helping an imperfect world improve.

Solarpunk would necessitate the inverse, islands of discontent in a perfect world, which will then be the source of conflict and thus given the most attention, watering down theintended optimism.

isn't solar punk just technogaianism? It's optimal.

Look at postmodern architecture that neolibs love.

Shiny twisting spires! Devoid of culture or meaning! It doesn't matter that those towers are surrounded by slums, as long as the elite are satisfied.

Frank Gehry is the Albert Speer of neoliberalism.