My 2.3 regular readers might remember when I disavowed solarpunk a couple weeks ago:
cyberpunk gardening? isn't that just solarpunk? (no)
...well, ya girl has been doing some reading since. Especially because there are a LOT of literary magazines out there taking solarpunk fiction right now. And ya girl likes to get paid.
I still find it meaningful to distinguish between solarpunk and what I've termed "cyberpunk gardening." If solarpunk is a garden in August, cyberpunk gardening is that same garden in the first week of April. It's still bleak, the weather is still unpredictable, half your seeds didn't come up and the other half haven't even been planted yet, and you're staring at the thing wondering what the hell you thought you were doing and when the ordinance guy is going to descend upon you for the mess in your yard.
I go through this stage with my own (literal) garden every April. It is the stage where I cannot make myself believe seeds will turn into plants:
gardening: things i need to remind myself every year
But I plant them anyway. Why? I have no idea. Faith is a funny thing.
So when I write about "cyberpunk gardening," or I write the sort of stories I think of as cyberpunk gardening, I'm not writing about a future where humans make it. I'm writing about a present where all seeds look like dirt, but we plant them anyway. Even if we have no idea why.
But: The more solarpunk fiction I read, the more I see the value.
In my last post on cyberpunk gardening vs. solarpunk, I said that one of my issues with solarpunk was that it posits a future, whereas I'm concerned about my high-poverty urban school kids in the present. I want us to survive the cyberpunk now so that a solarpunk future is still possible.
I still am concerned about the present. But I now see the importance of both types of story: cyberpunk-present tales that explain how to push back now, AND solarpunk-future tales that give us a sustainable, supportive future to strive toward. My students need stories that give them a vision of an adulthood worth living, of projects worth doing, of communities worth building. I need those stories too.
Just like my early garden plants provide shade and support for later ones, cyberpunk-gardening fiction provides shade and support for solarpunk visions.
I am the problem with solarpunk. Only half joking.
I'm currently working on a short story I'd like to feel more solarpunk than it does, but I run into a problem a lot of writers seem to: where's the conflict in a utopian future?
Reddit kindly pointed out that the main conflicts in solarpunk futures are likely to be interpersonal. After all, none of us can build the renewable-energy, circular-economy setups these stories feature without considerable help from other humans.
This makes sense. Humans are and always have been a social, communal species. We didn't evolve alone, we didn't invent anything alone, and we won't survive as a species alone. We need each other. We always have.
I know this. I also know how strongly it conflicts with my fondest desire: to live in a cabin in the woods I built myself and only communicate with other humans when I leave it to stock up on groceries once every couple months.
Not even joking. When wee molly was in fifth grade, we were tasked with drawing ourselves in our imagined future and writing a paragraph about it. I wrote that I wanted to live in a cabin in the woods and never see other humans. I would be a writer who only communicated with my editor via telephone and fax machine (it would be another year before I discovered the Internet).
My teacher told me this was not possible. Funny - I spent all of 2012 doing basically this. (It got old, and I started teaching again in 2013.)
Conflict in solarpunk? I got your intrapersonal AND interpersonal conflict right here. No wonder I prefer the "here's a story where the main character does individual resistance stuff in surprising detail" approach of cyberpunk gardening to the "here's a story about people having conflicts about where to store the water supply" approach of solarpunk. We can't change our natures, I guess.
We need both types of stories. I'd like to write both types of stories. And man, is that going to be work. Kinda like the garden.
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