Joyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ (2024) is a solarpunk short story in which nothing much happens. The lack of incident is probably deliberate: a gentle rejection of the idea that all narratives need conflict. Put your characters in horrible situations and watch them struggle to survive: this is standard creative writing advice. It may be more steeped in capitalist ideology than we care to admit.
By contrast, the closest Ch’ng’s story gets to real jeopardy is a flock of birds smacking into a solar panel. The solar panel is easily repaired. The bird strike could even be taken as a positive sign. It implies a lot of birds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped to kick off (or revive) the environmental movement in the 1960s, takes its title from imagining the loss of birdsong.
Ida loved birds. Their songs would wake her up every morning. There were no more cases of poaching (or so the newspapers said). Native birds were returning. Numbers were climbing up once more, helped by careful husbandry and re-introduction of species.
Solarpunk is an eclectic genre. It typically envisions hopeful futures, where humans live in harmony with nature, and often with one-another as well. Solarpunk communities are often multi-species communities. The term solarpunk seems to have originated in an anonymous 2008 blog post, ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk,’ imagining the widespread return of wind-powered sea freight. This contemplative excitement about technology, old or new—or both old and new—has continued to characterise solarpunk.
Crucially, solarpunk prefers to tackle technical problems and ecological crises in ways that serve social justice. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank writes, “imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.”[1] The genre may not have a consistent set of politics, but it often resonates with degrowth and postgrowth perspectives, as well as pluriversal politics — that is, mobilising local, traditional, and Indigenous worldviews in ways that may diverge from mainstream sustainable development discourse.
Renan Bernardo is a Nebula finalist author of science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Podcastle,Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, and others. His writing scope is broad, from secondary world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His solarpunk/clifi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance, was published in 2024. His fiction has also appeared in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. He can be found at Twitter (@RenanBernardo), BlueSky (@renanbernardo.bsky.social) and his website: www.renanbernardo.com
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF magazine & the soon to be relaunched Galaxy magazine. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
JPG – In many of your stories you juxtapose the past with the present, layering multiple times together, tell us about using this narrative device, and how you use it for emotional effect?
RB – Layering past and present together without necessarily resorting to flashbacks is an excellent device to make the reader flow along with the main character’s feelings without breaking the pace of the story. I believe the past has a lot of things to say. Our past shapes who we are, so it always adds an interesting layer to my stories. Many answers to the present and the future are in the past. I believe that you were thinking of “Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” when you thought about that question. In this story, there are three timelines layered separately: past, present, future, each with different things to say about the characters, different emotional cores to introduce that end up fusing in the end. The challenge is always to weave them all together, so they don’t feel detached from each other, but I like to believe that I achieved it in this particular story.
JPG – Your stories often present utopias, but as you mention in your forwards, one person’s utopia can be another person’s dystopia. Can you speak about this concept and why cultures have a difficult time envisioning positive futures that include everyone?
RB – There are two stories in the collection that introduce this concept: “Anticipation of Hollowness” and “To Remember the Poison.” In “Anticipation of Hollowness,” there’s a sustainable city where everything seems perfect but the city is extremely gentrified and no one from lower or middle class is able to live in it anymore. And “To Remember the Poison” is an extreme version of it: a society based on justice, sustainability, and equality that got so detached from the rest of the world that it became an exclusive haven closed to the world. And though its focus is on education and expanding their “green” world, its inhabitants tend to follow a line of thought not so different from what billionaires imagine with their projects of selective bunkers or space stations. And given the concentration of resources and knowledge of Verdoá (the city in the story), it becomes a colonizing power in the region.
Danbee ‘Tauntaun‘ Kim, PhD; Xiao Xiao, PhD; and Amelia Goldie, MArch
This artwork-essay first appeared in Vector: Futures, a publication in part supported by the PASTRES programme (Pastoralism, Uncertainty, Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins, www.pastres.org), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) (Grant No. 70432). PASTRES is co-hosted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the European University Institute (EUI).
To understand Gross Ideas, start with the Oslo Architecture Triennale to which this book is a companion. The Triennale is “a member organization that unites the major architecture and urban planning networks in Norway” for conversations and public programs about the role of architecture in society. Participants and supporters include national associations of design professionals, architecture schools, Norwegian government agencies, and international architecture firms with Norwegian roots. The 2019 Triennale in the fall of 2019, was the seventh iteration.
Some of the contributors identify as writers and some as architects, and a few work both sides. There are two poems, one graphic narrative, and fourteen prose narratives of widely differing character …
The book itself is a miscellany of contributions that is more a curated exhibit in verbal form than a tightly edited collection, a characterization that I suspect the curator-editors would find quite acceptable. Some of the contributors identify as writers and some as architects, and a few work both sides. There are two poems, one graphic narrative, and fourteen prose narratives of widely differing character. Some of these latter are stories that could easily find homes in science fiction magazines. Others range from Will Self’s takeoff on Invisible Cities to Lesley Lokko’s essay on women and transnational remittances that includes a fictional vignette, a short factual summary, and scholarly endnotes (it is quite effective).
Architects have long delighted to imagine grand buildings and building schemes—Arturo Soria y Mata’s Ciudad Lineal, the arcologies of Paolo Soleri, Walking City and other thought experiments of the Archigram group, a linear supercity from Michael Graves, the mile-high skyscraper of Frank Lloyd Wright (even Burj Khalifa gets only halfway there). Science fiction has appropriated the taste for the grandiose from Trantor and Coruscant to countless artists’ depictions of imagined urban futures full of soaring towers in shimmering color.
What naïve readers might expect from the “architecture” in the subtitle is often absent …
There is no such here. What naïve readers might expect from the “architecture” in the subtitle is often absent. Instead we get one story in which the largest building is a village house (Sophie Mackintosh, “Placation”), a second set in a caricature of a dusty, unchanging town of the old American Southwest (Joel Blackledge, “Fountainwood”), and another in derelict and abandoned Edinburgh (Camilla Grudova, “Deliberate Ruins’). The only story to center a single building uses an unfinished and abandoned Persian Gulf skyscraper (Deepak Unnikrishnan, “Cat”). The other entry in which architecture is the explicit focus is the graphic narrative “Exile’s Letter” by Mill + Jones, which chronicles efforts to build in a low-technology future (temple, town, giant fishing pier) that are laid low by fire and flood and end with the triumph of unbuilding in a sort of Nature-driven version of the Tower of Babel.
Some of the entries posit future engineering rather than architecture—a distinction that the curators and the Triennale folks would likely disregard anyway. For example, Robin Nicholson projects the green retrofitting of London in 2039. I had the most fun with “The Aqueduct,” which presents a scenario for replacing Britain’s rail and road transportation with a set of canals. It is a fascinating think-piece that painlessly introduces elementary physics to extrapolate from Britain’s current restored canals. If he hasn’t, author Steve Webb should look up Railroads and American Economic Growth by my old graduate professor Robert Fogel, which includes a long counterfactual to test whether the United States might have had the same robust economic growth had it invested in canals and river improvements rather than railroads in the nineteenth century.
As she starts work and experiments on her own small house, she finds herself slowly absorbed by the microbes …
The contributors took to heart the theme of the 2019 Triennale—“Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth.” Some stories imagine the built world in decay (Grudova, Unnikrishnan), others the natural world actively triumphant (Mackintosh). Lev Bratishenko, “You Wanted This,” reports a future United Nations conference at which national representatives offer their own favored ways to drastically reduce the world population—the Russians want to use thermonuclear bombs, the Japanese want to weaponize the Internet of Things, the Americans want to drug everyone to euphoric death (cue up Serenity). One of the most powerful stories is Rachel Armstrong’s “Bittersweet Building.” A new architecture graduate in desperate need of a job catches on with a Norwegian firm that is trying to incorporate bacteria as part of a building’s metabolism (waste into clean water, heat, oxygen). As she starts work and experiments on her own small house, she finds herself slowly absorbed by the microbes into their own complex world and finally merging fully into the “metabolic community of the landscape.” It is both a chilling and a comforting variation on the natural process of bodily decay. For the theme of degrowth, score a big one for the Earth.
Having considered the “architecture” half of “tales of tomorrow’s architecture,” what about the “tales” part? To no surprise, the pieces run a wide span from interesting but undramatic speculation to engaging story. For an example from the didactic side, Edward Davey, “Oli Away,” uses the mechanism of a report on a gap year journey to explicate some favored energy and transportation options. The entries by Nicholson, Bratishenko, and Webb are additional examples of scenario-building rather than storytelling. They have a lot of information without much surrounding story, which is not to say that we should not think about the ideas they present. After all, nobody read Looking Backward for its compelling characters and plot, but it had enormous influence.
Several of the contributions that are strong as stories are, not surprisingly, by people with lots of writing experience who know how to create engaging characters. For many Vector readers, the biggest name in the collection is Cory Dotorow, who contributes an interesting variation on his Disneyland obsession with “Materiality.” He posits a theme park in which high school classes spend a week inhabiting reconstructed towns from different eras. Think Main Street USA meets the living displays of colonial “savages” found at early twentieth century world’s fairs (also see the living diorama in Colson Whitehead’s fantastic alternative view of American history in The Underground Railroad). The theme park contrasts with a present in which recycling and three-dimensional printed make the objects of everyday life ephemeral if not immaterial. Doctorow’s teenaged protagonist indirectly confronts the lasting imprint that seriously stupid Old Timey People left on the landscape by considering whether his favorite old tee shirt is still cool (it is).
… architecture as a practice of designing individual buildings should be and is being swallowed up by the all-consuming impacts of climate change and necessary transformations in global energy systems.
Maria Smith in “Lay Low” uses the familiar frame of singles gossiping in a bar to introduce a society of scarcity in which everyone has monetized allowances for necessities like water, food, and electricity. Her variation on a familiar science fiction future is a new way to get ahead on your budget—perhaps—by going into hibernation for a few months to lower your consumption levels and build up points. The women in the bar, who are just learning about the new option, don’t think that monetizing unconsciousness is going to go well.
Jo Lindsay Walton contributed the longest, most complex, and perhaps most readable story (no, there was collusion with your book review editor). “In Arms” is cleverly constructed with two parallel threads—a woman waiting for a date to show up and an ecoterrorist launching an operation—that slowly grow more complex and intertwine in unexpected ways. Radical changes in building styles are slipped in as background, including the cool idea that rising seas have forced the seat of British government to shift to a mobile seastead platform nicknamed Wetminster.
Without the subtitle and the wraparound material describing the Triennale, someone who casually reads through Gross Ideas would think it is about economic transition and “degrowth” in general, with architecture one of many avenues of exploration. The overall message is that architecture as a practice of designing individual buildings should be and is being swallowed up by the all-consuming impacts of climate change and necessary transformations in global energy systems. Some contributors see a complete devolution to a nonindustrial future, others a society of scarcity, and still others an adapting world. Tomorrow’s architecture, the book suggests, will be valuable to the extent that it is subordinated not just to social needs—an architectural truism, if not always heeded—but rather to fundamental institutional and social transformation.
Carl Abbott is author of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, and Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis.
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