As a newcomer to the Solarpunk genre, I’ll say I don’t think it’s utopian or without conflict. (In fiction at least, the green cityscape pictures everyone posts do seem to be). The fiction I’ve read tends to be about coping with disaster, picking up the pieces, learning what lessons we can, and trying to fix things or at least mitigate further damage. There’s often a bit of postapoclyptia mixed in, but with more of a focus on (re)building community and helping each other, rather than the themes of ruthless individualism and all humans being bastards that show up more in post-apocalyptic stories. There’s plenty of room for conflict in there, along with examinations of how our society is built and whether we could do things differently. It’s very much a genre for the moment, when so many warnings have been ignored and it’s tempting to just kind of give up.

I think that’s kind of the difference: that if cyberpunk is often built around warnings (about corporations, technologies, the way humans will exploit them / each other) solarpunk seems to be trying to offer solutions as well. I think there’s a space for that in fiction - so much of what is invented seems to be shaped by the fiction that inspires us, the logic goes, so if we only fill that space with warnings, we’ll just end up with tech billionaires building torment nexuses because they missed the point. I will say that I’ve found solarpunk to be much harder to write, personally, and that my own fiction diet is much heavier on cyberpunk and military scifi than on solarpunk stuff.

From what I’ve seen, solarpunk seems new, far-less-defined, and often blended with other genres. (I’d say The Terraformers, which has been excellent so far, has some deep cyberpunk vibes, corporations as states, living people and their planets as products, but it’s kind of in the background to a fight over land rights and how the main characters’ planet is exploited). I think genre can often be determined by which part of a setting we happen to be looking at. I also think stories that solarpunk claims can fit under other labels just as well.

I don’t know if any of that was helpful or interesting, but I hope it was.

I actually really dig rural cyberpunk, probably because I’m from a pretty rural area and it looks so natural to me. Bits of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and I think some of his other stories spend some time in those spaces, though not all of them are springing to mind at the moment. I think I’d even count Looper, some of the shots in there are great.

I’ll definitely check out 2067 - big fan of time travel movies.