This post was originally a Discord reply to the Planets & Monsters post, Second Wave Solarpunk. and then I realized thanks to Seraphina's Short Blog Manifesto that I should just post this on my own, very infrequently used blog.
Planets & Monsters writes:
[Solarpunk] slaps trees on skyscrapers instead of wondering how society might have to change to get into ecological balance. It isn't looking to imagine new ways of living outside the capitalist mode of production.
Bingo. The major failure of solarpunk fiction (and the greater aesthetic form), is in failing to present new, anticapitalist economic pathways, and instead buying wholeheartedly into the messianic techbro mindset that "tech will save us," which it cannot. Only we as people can help each other. We might use tech to assist, but it must be a human endeavor.
Science fiction that imagines a better future doesn't imagine a world without conflict, it imagines what new conflicts will be there, or what conflicts that exist today have taken new form in the future.
What Planet & Monsters writes about here is the basis for the critical utopia genre, as Tom Moylan calls it in his seminal work Demand the Impossible (1986).
Planet & Monsters is not looking for Second Wave Solarpunk, but for the critical utopia. A genre that takes in the true, face value of the challenges of modern and future civilization and presents a better way of life in the path forward. It's hard, many failures occur along the way, and life is not the idyllic perfect society, but one of struggle and constant fighting for a better life. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and especially Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy are perfect examples of this genre.
Kim Stanely Robinson (KSR) has based his whole writing career on writing utopian fiction, and I think his books are more "solarpunk" than anything else lauded as such. I still find it striking how the dichotomy of futures between The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge reflects our modern times, and these were written in the 80s. The latter is a major solarpunk book, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who has actually read it (but I haven't been asking around for the past few years either, granted).
KSR collected an anthology that hits at the utopian heart of that solarpunk's arrow missed, Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias. I grabbed this from my university library in 2010, and I'm not sure it's widely available. This book was how I discovered Terry Bisson & Gene Wolfe. I read it shortly after reading Le Guin's Planets of Exile & Illusion for the first time.
Anywho, great post from Planets & Monsters that let me relive my uni days of studying utopianism.
