The other day I found A Solarpunk Manifesto in my inbox, thanks to Joe Stech and his News Refinery newsletter.
I was vaguely aware of solarpunk as a genre, associating it with progressive technological optimism, an alternative to both dystopian science fiction and steampunk. But I’d never read any attempt to describe it explicitly.
Reading the manifesto, my general reaction was yes. Count me in for science fiction as activism, post-scarcity, post-capitalism, post-hierarchical society, and the whole shebang.
While I’ve never described the Reclaimed Earth series as solarpunk, the Ringstation Coalition culture checks all of the boxes. So do aspects of my novelette The Icelandic Cure, and many of my short stories.
So yeah, I guess I’m a solarpunk author, at least in part.
Here’s the manifesto in full, shared via Creative Commons license: