The hard work to hope—and heal
Tough emotions while writing solarpunk, less complex melodies, feminine-named hurricanes and unusual deaths.
The cafe-bar at the WorldCon venue sported a vaulted glass roof, and on any other cloudy day, the natural light pouring down on us would have been welcome. But on this rare afternoon, the sun had burned off the clouds. Seated at wood-and-metal tables that exude a somewhat Steampunk-lite aesthetic, we’d begun to feel the heat despite the condensation dripping off the glass sides of our tall, cold drinks.
Being subjected to the greenhouse effect felt oddly appropriate—given the conversation topic at hand between Phoebe Wagner and myself. We’d crossed paths several times at various online events—she’d even accepted one of my stories to her anthology Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales—but we’d never had the opportunity to meet in person, until now. Among the many things we discussed, we talked about just how difficult it is to write solarpunk.
Phoebe’s essay The Solarpunk Garden: Moving Beyond Eden had just been published in an issue of Speculative Insights recently. There, she unpacks a potential reason for Western-centric narratives in the genre to fixate on “garden stories”, presenting a thesis that left me reeling and questioning my own biases—in a good way. In her essay, she also wrote:
Any other type of writing is easier for me than writing a solarpunk story. I have to investigate my worldview every time I sit down to imagine such responses to climate change and work through my own pessimism and frustration with U.S. society when trying to figure out how we could thrive.
Between 2020 and 2022, I wrote almost exclusively solarpunk stories, and to my astonishment, nearly all of them found a home in a publication. Then quite suddenly midway through 2023, I found myself burned out and utterly unable to write another. I very much want to believe that speculative fiction has a function, that it has an important role to interrogate possible futures—including ones we would want to live in. But I was finding it impossible to digest yet another academic paper on flood modelling, or skim another news article on a struggling species. Even reading dystopian stories by my fellow writer-friends felt difficult; we already know that cautionary tales have not worked, so why do we keep writing them?
It’s easy to give in to despair. But it’s also equally tempting to take the shortcut through pollyannaism; a candy-floss veneer of green-frilled aesthetic—without questioning the systems that enable such places to exist, without the critical examination of our own belief systems and cultural biases, and the hold these have on our storytelling. Phoebe calls this necessary thinking “deep work”.
For myself, examining solutions to the environmental challenges that form the backdrop of stories I aspire to write, I feel the need to peel back every aspect of our world. Speculative fiction has the keys to examine how our existing economies, governance models and infrastructure work—or how they don’t—and therefore what ensuing consequences might look like when factors change. But without articulating the kind of a world we want to live in and how we might get there, we can only rage and raise protest placards in streets littered with advertising that continue to prey on our insatiable desires, reminding us where to spend our dwindling disposable income—if we had any left.
Writing climate fiction surfaces the inevitable grief to contend with, a process that sometimes takes me whole days. I recently confided in a friend that I’ve learned to factor in time for breaking down in tears during the worldbuilding of a solarpunk story. What are we truly going to lose in the next twenty, thirty years? Land, lives, history and heritage, flora and fauna—what else? And if it’s this hard, why do I keep writing these types of stories?
The moment of realisation came to me at this year’s Solarpunk Conference, where the wonderful Starhawk gave an inspiring opening keynote. I’d taken the liberty to transcribe some of her wise words, mostly so I can keep them close to heart:
If you look around you’ll notice that not much of what we portray about the future is very positive. If you watch the movies it’s all Mad Max, it’s American civil war, it’s disaster—and there’s a reason for that. As humans we tend to get our attention grabbed when we get our nervous systems activated, by adrenaline, by fight or flight and danger, things that threaten us on a survival level.
But there is a magical teaching that says: what you envision, what you have in your mind is where your energy flows, and where your energy flows is what you manifest.
If you think about it, all of this negative picturing of the future, in some ways, it’s almost like casting a spell that says: this is what we’re going to get, this is what we have in our minds, this is all we envision in our minds, and that’s in some ways where our energy is flowing.
I’m not saying that no one should ever write disturbing fiction—in my books there are positive visions and negative ones—because part of the job of fiction, and I think, especially futuristic fiction, is to warn. But if we don’t counter that with any kind of vision of hope or possibility, then we don’t have any way to direct that energy into something that might bring a more positive future about. And so in that sense, the work of solarpunk is tremendously important—and that the more that we can provide for people some kind of image, some kind of vision of what we could be, what we might want to be.
It’s a powerful act of cultural healing.
To write solarpunk is to heal.
This evening, the super blue sturgeon moon gleams outside my window, a golden disc in the clear night sky. It also happens to be the Chinese Ghost Festival. Not a bad time, perhaps, to undertake that deep work, acknowledge our inner ghosts, pay respects to our ancestral past, and manifest hope for a better future.
In my last post, I alluded to working on a generation ship story. I’m truly pleased that A Spell for Stardust was selected for Flame Tree Press' special limited edition newsletter for Glasgow WorldCon 2024, to the theme of “New Mythologies in Space”. It was in print only, so I’ve made it available to read here.
My light-hearted, uplifting novelette about a community of residents getting together in a rather chaotic fashion to decide what to do with their new car-free street, The Perpetual Metamorphosis of Primrose Close, has been published in ParSec Magazine #11.
Two more of my stories will appear in two separate projects with Air and Nothingness Press very soon. The first being Fathoms in the Earth, containing retellings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with titles inspired by Peter Greenaway’s rather eclectic but beautiful film Prospero’s Books. The second, Inter Librarian Loan, is an incredibly fun project where past Librarian authors wrote divergent stories/fan-fic of each others’ works.
I’ve been trying my best to stay focused, but still …
… rabbit holes!
Hurricane with feminine names cause significantly more deaths because people apparently underestimate their severity. 🙀
In keeping with my tradition of injecting occasional grim reality, here’s a list of unusual deaths.
You never know if you might need a gem of a resource about the history of the streets in Islington, London.
May your inner journeys be illuminated by moonlight.