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The Audacity of Hope (Redux)
Or What’s Your Vision of a Good Society?
(From my fall Workable Utopias newsletter, which you can sign up for here, just four emails/year.)
This issue, I had planned to talk about solar punk, an emerging sub-genre of science fiction focused on worlds that use green technology. To educate myself, I picked up one of its earliest exemplars, the Brazilian anthology Solar Punk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (2012, English translation 2018). Yet in this volume, which advertises itself as “envision[ing] hopeful futures and alternate histories,” I found utopian desires thwarted. Thus, this is a more downbeat feature than I had intended but one, I hope, with a positive call to action.
The stories in this volume do engage with alternative technologies, some in very creative ways, and some depict worlds that have solved or avoided some of our current socio-ecological problems. I loved the stories that gave a strong voice to indigenous traditions. But of nine stories, only one, Roberta Spindler’s “Sun in the Heart,” seems to me to depict a social order that is not significantly unhealthy, and several stories are frankly dystopian. The societies presented are mostly mired in the typical problems: war, violence, overpopulation, resource scarcity, and politicking. The tone is perhaps best summed up by the title of the first story, Carlos Orsi’s “Soylent Green Is People!”
Now, as I’ve said, this is an early solar punk volume. As I continue to research solar punk, I have high hopes I will find a more utopian bent emerging. Nonetheless, this collection fits uncomfortably into the general state of worldbuilding in genre fiction today, which is to say, the nature of our ability to imagine the future.( Read more... )
Or What’s Your Vision of a Good Society?
(From my fall Workable Utopias newsletter, which you can sign up for here, just four emails/year.)
This issue, I had planned to talk about solar punk, an emerging sub-genre of science fiction focused on worlds that use green technology. To educate myself, I picked up one of its earliest exemplars, the Brazilian anthology Solar Punk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (2012, English translation 2018). Yet in this volume, which advertises itself as “envision[ing] hopeful futures and alternate histories,” I found utopian desires thwarted. Thus, this is a more downbeat feature than I had intended but one, I hope, with a positive call to action.
The stories in this volume do engage with alternative technologies, some in very creative ways, and some depict worlds that have solved or avoided some of our current socio-ecological problems. I loved the stories that gave a strong voice to indigenous traditions. But of nine stories, only one, Roberta Spindler’s “Sun in the Heart,” seems to me to depict a social order that is not significantly unhealthy, and several stories are frankly dystopian. The societies presented are mostly mired in the typical problems: war, violence, overpopulation, resource scarcity, and politicking. The tone is perhaps best summed up by the title of the first story, Carlos Orsi’s “Soylent Green Is People!”
Now, as I’ve said, this is an early solar punk volume. As I continue to research solar punk, I have high hopes I will find a more utopian bent emerging. Nonetheless, this collection fits uncomfortably into the general state of worldbuilding in genre fiction today, which is to say, the nature of our ability to imagine the future.( Read more... )
