@clover Walkaway was neat, and Half-Built Garden was lovely, and The Disposessed is a classic. Maybe one of those will tickle your fancy? A longer list: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/131328.Solarpunk_Community_Discord_List
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Solarpunk themed fiction. Books, short stories, movies, games... pretty much anything you can dream of!
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I liked Doctorow's Walkaway a lot. I was not prepared for what the subreddit was. I realize that they only share a name, but I walked into that sub thinking it was fans of the book.
I've tried Le Guin a few times and haven't been able to get into her work. I will check out Half-built Garden, thanks!
Walkaway was awesome
I'm really enjoying Walkaway. I went in not knowing much aside from the fact that it was recommended by a solarpunk group I'm in. It's been quite a surprise to read! The Dispossessed is definitely my next book
@metalplates I'm not a huge fan of where the end of the book goes, but the solarpunk future it imagines has a lot going for it ime.
Yeah I'm nearly done with Chapter 3 which has been a WILD RIDE
@clover I loved A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers and have everything else by her on my TBR list now. It’s very solarpunk!
Another vote for Becky Chambers, especially the Monk & Robot series, but also Wayfarers. Her novels are a bit shorter and/or less deep than you might find elsewhere (not necessarily in a bad way) but they are very solarpunk and cozy. Highly recommended.
@clover I thought "The Terraformers" was an excellent long form solarpunk novel. The themes of nature and community to overcome oppression were very satisfying.
That one is on my list!
Have you looked into Kim Stanley Robinson particularly his Mars Trilogy? It deals with a lot of utopian, ecological, libertarian socialist, and transhumanist themes. It predates solarpunk as a genre but it resonates a lot with solarpunk themes. The Mars Trilogy isn't complete without its fourth companion book The Martians which contains alternate universes, prequels, midquels, and spin offs to the main story.
His book New York 2140 would fit the bill as well, I think.
I really enjoyed 2140.
There's Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach, which would probably qualify as ptoto-solarpunk at the very least, preceding the genre by a few decades as far as I know. I don't know how much it influenced what came later - I don't see it mentioned too often - but it has all the elements, even if it's dated in a few places. It's not exactly a regular fiction novel, but is formatted as a Travelogue and journal entries of an American reporter who has been allowed into the fictional secessionist west coast society of Ecotopia. It's well written but the plot is mostly there to explore a society that put the wilildist dreams of 1970s environmentals into practice, along with the challenges and problems they'd run into. It devotes sections to almost everything you could want in a solarpunk setting, from social justice, walkable cities, rail transportation, the right to repair, sustainable timbering and rewilding, and a revolution that turned most businesses into co-ops owned by their employees after the rich fled to the US rather than pay Ecotopia's higher taxes.
It's from the 1970s so climate change doesn't come up - in fact their focus on avoiding plastics and other undecompostable materials struck me as being a bit energy-wasteful in parts, but it's worth it to read this reporter describing recycling as this new and exotic concept.
Organized into articles the narrator sent east for publication, and his own journal entries, the book is organized into chapters titled things like "Ecotopia Television and it's Wares" or "Car-Less Living in Ecotopia's new Towns" with each section staying on topic well enough that you could almost quote from it on most issues like some kind of solarpunk bible. (Edit: which I actually kind of did here, near the end, if you want a sample of the writing: https://slrpnk.net/post/379197)
So I'm not sure if it'll be a good fit, but if you run out of everyone else's suggestions I'd say it's worth a look.
Iain Banks Culture series