In a few days, Alyssa K. Watson’s interview with me on Carbon Culture Review will no longer be featured, replaced by an interview with Alia Gee or Claudie Arsenault. Not sure who’s next, but I’m excited. I’m looking forward to reading the opinions of other writers on this genre. Writers, artists, innovators, philosophers, scientist–we influence each other in ways that move the whole forward. And Solarpunk is a genre that deserves to be moved, pushed, prodded, and speculated forward.
Why?
My interests can be explained by a very misunderstood yet often quoted scientist, historian, and philosopher at MIT, Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). He wrote a number of books; one of them The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996) was responsible for the equally misunderstood and overused word paradigm. But in my humble opinion, what he truly should be lauded for is this idea that our language and our culture are limited by our science and our science is limited by our language and culture. To get a sense of how difficult it is to understand the depth and breadth of this sort-of ouroboros-driven concept, read Tom Horgan’s interview, What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought About Scientific Truth in Scientific American.
Said another way, scientifically we get stuck in our own mind (or cultural) speak and can’t see far enough to move in new directions beyond what we know, until somehow we do and then everything changes including our mind speak.
However, I believe art, particularly speculative fiction, is the exception limited only by our imagination and our perceived needs. And those needs are ever expanding, which sparks innovation, which feeds on ideas, which is the brainchild of speculative fiction. As a result, science fiction has this ability to push us culturally and scientifically. Think of how many innovations we take for granted that were first encountered in speculative fiction, and then think of how many of us are waiting for that opportunity to speak into our watches and look at the faces of our loved ones like a certain square-jawed detective, who first showed up in our culture-speak eighty-four years ago. Are we on the verge of having Dick Tracy watches? Apple certainly banked on it by securing the trademark to the iWatch.
So why Solarpunk?
In the Carbon Culture interview, I mention the dominant culture-speak that “right now, post-apocalyptic thinking seems to have become the de rigueur mindset—nuclear war is inevitable, we’re going to run out of resources, we’re killing all life on earth. It’s as though we can’t see past our own terrible end.”
If you recall, leading up to the idea that the world is going to end badly, there was this thing that was supposed to happen in 2012. Somewhere someone mentioned the Mayan calendar ended on December 21, 2012. I imagine, despite archeologists telling us differently, someone else then speculated about the coming end of time. And from there someone speculate the world was going to end. (I’d love to know the details of how this all came about–if you know how, please do leave a note in the comments.) But the idea didn’t grow and gain momentum until the writers of speculative fiction ran with it. Suddenly we had people across the globe preparing for the end of the world (or technology) with underground bunkers, canned foods, and gallons of water.
But we haven’t died. And the world hasn’t been destroyed by meteors. And the good things that have come out of that phase of cultural mind speak is that scientists are monitoring the skies with ideas as to how to deal with impending disasters and we–all of us, whether we believe in global warming or not–are aware of the consequences of all sorts of pollution, even light pollution.
But we’re also still stuck in this doomsday mind speak, even though Cracked.com has assured us that a zombie outbreak would fail.
But that’s because Cracked.com is humor, and while humor can be the wind beneath our collective wings, speculative fiction is the muscle and brawn that makes us fly. Science fiction excels at changing our mind speak because anything we see or read becomes real to us. And that’s where solarpunk can help. We can convert to clean power. We can rely on clean resources. We can make a clean future for ourselves and our progeny.
This is why we need more artists, more writers, more innovators to envision how and where and with what do we transition this world of ours into positive realism, as first coined on the tumbler group. This is why if you love science fiction, I hope you’ll consider writing, reading, and imagining in the solarpunk genre.
It’s a gift, you see, one where we can make a difference for the world. But please note–as a writer, I’m not suggesting we write “Happy, Happy–Joy, Joy” stories. When we’ve fixed the world, so to speak, then we’ll have the real problem at hand—fixing ourselves. Which is what Solarpunk as a genre gives us the opportunity to do – focus the microscope on the true nature of our problems–ourselves.
Last week I posed the question “#Solarpunk what would you do with www.solarpunk.COM and www.solarpunk.ORG? To vote/signup visit www.sherylkaleo.com/solarpunk/. If you haven’t voted on solarpunk.org and solarpunk.com, please do, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
In 2013, I self-published my novel Donor on Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Author page, and All Romance eBooks.Donor is about a sixteen-year-old girl who discovers that everything she ever knew about her life is a lie. Donor chronicles Shreya’s journey from an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl living in upstate Louisiana to a fugitive on the run from the law, the unlawful, and those beyond any natural laws known to Humankind. For a peek at the series back cover click blurb.