Optimistic tales of humans and animals living together in urban futures. We love Solarpunk fiction!
We love the proliferation of subgenres of science-fiction that relate to climate crisis - and we love solar punk most of all (see our archive). When we saw the promo for the above book, we couldn’t resist re-promoting it. From this website:
“Cities are alive, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What might city ecosystems look like in the future if we strive for multispecies justice in our urban settings?
“In these more-than-human stories, twenty-four authors investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters in situations where humans have to look beyond their own needs and interests. Including these stories:
A quirky eco-businessman sees broader applications for a high school science fair project.
A bad date in Hawai‘i takes an unexpected turn when the couple stumbles upon some confused sea turtle hatchlings.
A genetically-enhanced supersoldier struggles to find new purpose in a peaceful Tokyo.
A community service punishment in Singapore leads to unexpected friendships across age and species.
A boy and a mammoth trek across Asia in search of kin.
A Tamil child learns the language of the stars.
Set primarily in the Asia-Pacific, these stories engage with the serious issues of justice, inclusion, and sustainability that affect the region, while offering optimistic visions of tomorrow's urban spaces.
Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures will be out in ebook and paperback on April 13, 2021! Preorder your copy now - book and e-book.
Table of Contents
"Listen: A Memoir" by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
"By the Light of the Stars" by N. R. M. Roshak
"Old Man's Sea" by Meyari McFarland
"Deer, Tiger, and Witch" by Kate V. Bui
"Vladivostok" by Avital Balwit
"The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
"Untamed" by Timothy Yam
"It is the year 2115" by Joyce Chng
"A Rabbit Egg for Flora" by Caroline M. Yoachim
"Iron Fox in the Marble City" by Vlad-Andrei Cucu
"Mariposa Awakening" by Joseph F. Nacino
"A Life With Cibi" by Natsumi Tanaka, translated by Toshiya Kamei
"Children of Asphalt" by Phoebe Wagner
"Down the River" by Eliza Victoria
"Becoming Martians" by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Toshiya Kamei
"Abso" by Sarah E. Stevens
"In Two Minds" by Joel R Hunt
"Arfabad" by Rimi B. Chatterjee
"The Mammoth Steps" by Andrew Dana Hudson
"Wandjina" by Amin Chehelnabi
World Weaver Press also do some more Solar Punk anthologies:
Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers
Blurb: The seventeen stories in this volume are not boring utopias—they grapple with real issues such as the future and ethics of our food sources, the connection or disconnection between technology and nature, and the interpersonal conflicts that arise no matter how peaceful the world is.
In these pages you’ll find a guerilla art installation in Milan, a murder mystery set in a weather manipulation facility, and a world where you are judged by the glow of your solar nanite implants.
From an opal mine in Australia to the seed vault at Svalbard, from a wheat farm in Kansas to a crocodile ranch in Malaysia, these are stories of adaptation, ingenuity, and optimism for the future of our world and others.
For readers who are tired of dystopias and apocalypses, these visions of a brighter future will be a breath of fresh air.
Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters
Blurb: This anthology envisions winters of the future, with stories of scientists working together to protect narwhals from an oil spill, to bring snow back to the mountains of Maine, to preserve ecosystems—even if they have to be under glass domes.
They're stories of regular people rising to extraordinary circumstances to survive extreme winter weather, to fix a threat to their community's energy source, to save a living city from a deep-rooted sickness.
Some stories take place after an environmental catastrophe, with luxury resorts and military bases and mafia strongholds transformed into sustainable communes.
Others rethink the way we could organize cities, using skybridges and seascrapers and constructed islands to adapt to the changes of the Anthropocene.
Even when the nights are long, the future is bright in these seventeen diverse tales.
Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World
Blurb: Imagine a sustainable world, run on clean and renewable energies that are less aggressive to the environment. Now imagine humanity under the impact of these changes. This is the premise Brazilian editor Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro proposed, and these authors took the challenge to envision hopeful futures and alternate histories.
The stories in this anthology explore terrorism against green corporations, large space ships propelled by the pressure of solar radiation, the advent of photosynthetic humans, and how different society might be if we had switched to renewable energies much earlier in history.
Originally published in Brazil and translated for the first time from the Portuguese by Fábio Fernandes, this anthology of optimistic science fiction features nine authors from Brazil and Portugal including Carlos Orsi, Telmo Marçal, Romeu Martins, Antonio Luiz M. Costa, Gabriel Cantareira, Daniel I. Dutra, André S. Silva, Roberta Spindler, and Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro.