Solarpunk
Based on Wikipedia: Solarpunk
What if science fiction got tired of warning us about the apocalypse and decided to show us how to avoid it instead?
That question sits at the heart of solarpunk, a movement that emerged in the 2010s as a direct rebellion against decades of dystopian storytelling. While cyberpunk gave us rain-soaked neon cities ruled by corporations, and post-apocalyptic fiction showed us scavenging through the ruins of civilization, solarpunk dared to imagine something different: a future where humanity actually figured things out.
The Name Itself Is a Statement
The word "solarpunk" packs two ideas into a single portmanteau. The "solar" part is both literal and metaphorical—it refers to renewable energy, particularly solar power, but also to brightness, optimism, and the warmth of the sun. The "punk" part signals rebellion, counterculture, and a do-it-yourself ethos inherited from earlier movements like punk rock and cyberpunk literature.
But here's the twist: solarpunk is punk in a peculiar way. It's rebelling against rebellion itself.
Cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s as a dark warning about where technology might take us—megacorporations controlling everything, the natural world paved over, humanity jacked into virtual realities to escape the misery of physical existence. The protagonists were hackers and outcasts fighting against systems too big to defeat. Cyberpunk was punk because it rejected the optimistic techno-utopianism of earlier science fiction.
Solarpunk rejects cyberpunk's pessimism. It asks: what if we took all that rebellious energy and pointed it at building something better, rather than just documenting how bad things could get? As James Machell wrote when solarpunk finally entered The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 2024, it is "a rebellion against a rebellion, born out of dystopia fatigue."
Origins in an Anonymous Blog Post and a Ship Pulled by Kites
The term first appeared in 2008, in a blog post titled "From Steampunk to Solarpunk." The anonymous author had been captivated by the MS Beluga Skysails, a cargo ship that used a massive computer-controlled kite to harness wind power and reduce its fuel consumption. It was the first vessel of its kind, a working example of futuristic technology that wasn't science fiction at all.
This ship crystallized something. Steampunk had already shown that speculative fiction could focus on specific technologies—in steampunk's case, Victorian-era steam engines and clockwork mechanisms, reimagined as the basis for entire civilizations. The anonymous blogger wondered: what would a similar genre look like if it centered on practical, sustainable technologies? What would fiction look like if it was guided by modern economics and environmental reality rather than escapism?
A year later, literary publicist Matt Staggs posted something he called a "GreenPunk Manifesto," describing a genre focused on knowable, do-it-yourself technologies and positive ecological change. The ideas were percolating, but they hadn't yet cohered into a recognizable movement.
That changed in 2014, when a visual artist named Olivia Louise posted concept art on Tumblr. Her images gave solarpunk a look: lush vertical gardens climbing the sides of buildings, solar panels integrated seamlessly into architecture, technology that enhanced nature rather than replacing it. The aesthetics drew heavily from Art Nouveau, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement characterized by flowing organic lines, plant motifs, and the integration of art into everyday objects. Where cyberpunk looked to film noir and Japanese urbanism for its visual language, solarpunk looked to the natural world.
Following Louise's art, researcher Adam Flynn contributed to Project Hieroglyph—a science fiction forum associated with Arizona State University—to further define what solarpunk might mean. His notes eventually became the foundation for "A Solarpunk Manifesto," published in 2019, which describes the movement as seeking to "answer and embody the questions 'what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?'"
Not Utopia, But Not Doom Either
Here's what solarpunk is not: a naive vision of a perfect world where all problems have been solved.
Solarpunk stories can and do depict struggle, injustice, environmental damage, and systemic failure. They show societies grappling with the aftermath of climate change, communities dealing with scarcity, and individuals fighting against oppressive power structures. The difference lies in perspective and possibility.
A cyberpunk story might show you a character surviving in a toxic wasteland, scrounging for resources in a world that has already been lost. A solarpunk story might show you a character working to restore that same wasteland, building something new from the wreckage. Both acknowledge the damage. Only one offers a path forward.
This distinction matters because fiction shapes our imagination, and our imagination shapes what we believe is possible. If every story about the future shows civilization collapsing, it becomes harder to imagine any other outcome. Solarpunk is, in part, a deliberate attempt to expand the range of futures we can envision.
The literary critic Rhys Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, described solarpunk as existing "against a shitty future"—using fiction as a tool to articulate alternatives rather than simply documenting decline.
The Technology Question
One of the most interesting tensions in solarpunk is its complicated relationship with technology.
On one hand, the genre is explicitly techno-optimistic. Solar panels, wind turbines, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture, advanced materials—solarpunk embraces the idea that human ingenuity can solve environmental problems. The "solar" in the name isn't metaphorical. It refers to actual solar energy as a foundation for sustainable civilization.
On the other hand, solarpunk is deeply skeptical of the kind of technology that dominates our current moment: opaque systems controlled by corporations, proprietary black boxes that users cannot understand or repair, digital infrastructure designed for surveillance and control. Solarpunk favors what has been called "appropriate technology"—tools that are comprehensible, repairable, and scaled to human needs rather than corporate profits.
This creates an aesthetic and philosophical tension that solarpunk has borrowed from retrofuturism—a related movement that looks back at earlier visions of the future, often finding them more appealing than what actually arrived. Retrofuturists admire the sleek Art Deco trains of the 1930s, the optimistic space-age designs of the 1960s, the gleaming world's fair pavilions that promised technology would serve humanity rather than the reverse. There's something in these old futures that feels more humane than smartphones and surveillance capitalism.
Solarpunk channels this sensibility. It wants advanced technology, but not alienating technology. It wants innovation, but innovation that people can understand and participate in. Tool libraries, maker spaces, open-source hardware, community gardens—these are as central to solarpunk as solar panels and wind farms.
The Art Nouveau Connection
Walk into a building designed in the Art Nouveau style and you'll immediately notice the organic curves. Doorframes sweep upward like growing vines. Windows are set in frames that ripple like water. Structural elements are decorated with leaves, flowers, and sinuous lines that evoke natural growth rather than industrial precision.
Art Nouveau emerged in the 1890s as a reaction against the industrial aesthetic that dominated the nineteenth century. Where factories and train stations were built with stark functionality—exposed iron, straight lines, no ornamentation—Art Nouveau artists and architects insisted that beauty mattered, that buildings could harmonize with nature rather than standing in opposition to it.
Solarpunk has adopted Art Nouveau as a primary visual influence for similar reasons. Both movements reject the idea that functional technology must be ugly or alienating. Both seek to integrate human creations with the natural world. And both emerged as reactions against a dominant aesthetic they found oppressive.
The most frequently cited example of real-world solarpunk architecture is Bosco Verticale in Milan, two residential towers designed by Boeri Studio and completed in 2014. The buildings are covered with over 900 trees and 20,000 plants, creating vertical forests that provide shade, absorb carbon dioxide, and support biodiversity. It looks like someone took a conventional high-rise and wrapped it in a jungle.
Studio Ghibli films, particularly Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, are often cited as proto-solarpunk despite predating the genre. Both films depict worlds where technology and nature are intertwined, where flying machines coexist with forests, and where the central conflicts involve protecting ecological systems from destruction. The visual style—hand-drawn, organic, full of impossible floating structures covered in vegetation—has become part of solarpunk's visual vocabulary.
Prefigurative Politics: Building the Future Now
Here's where solarpunk gets interesting as a social movement rather than just an artistic genre.
Prefigurative politics is a concept from social movement theory that describes the practice of creating spaces where the principles of a desired future can be demonstrated in the present. Rather than waiting for revolution to create a new world, prefigurative movements try to build that new world in the shell of the old one.
Solarpunks practice this through ecovillages—intentional communities designed around sustainable living. Through community gardens and urban farms that produce food locally. Through tool libraries where people can borrow equipment rather than each household owning rarely-used items. Through repair cafés where volunteers help people fix broken appliances rather than throwing them away. Through maker spaces where communities share expensive equipment for fabrication and manufacturing.
None of this requires waiting for governments to act or corporations to change. It's do-it-yourself activism, building alternative systems within existing society. The "punk" in solarpunk refers partly to this ethos of direct action and self-organization.
This connects solarpunk to a long tradition of anarchist and decentralist political thought. Social ecology, a framework developed by the American theorist Murray Bookchin, argued that environmental problems are fundamentally social problems—that ecological destruction stems from hierarchical and exploitative social structures, and that saving the environment requires transforming human society along more egalitarian and decentralized lines. Many solarpunk thinkers explicitly cite Bookchin as an influence.
Literary Ancestors
Although solarpunk as a named genre only emerged in the 2010s, it has claimed a number of earlier works as predecessors.
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, depicts an anarchist society on a barren moon, struggling to maintain its egalitarian principles while dealing with scarcity and external threats. The book is not optimistic in any simple sense—the anarchist society has serious problems, and Le Guin doesn't pretend otherwise—but it takes seriously the project of imagining what a radically different society might actually look like in practice.
Her 1985 novel Always Coming Home is even more explicitly relevant, depicting a future California society that has rebuilt itself along sustainable, decentralized lines after the collapse of industrial civilization. The book includes not just narrative fiction but also poetry, songs, anthropological descriptions, and even an audio cassette of music from the imagined culture.
Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, from 1975, imagines the Pacific Northwest seceding from the United States to create an ecological society. Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, from 1990, depicts a Southern California community that has transitioned to sustainable living. Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing, from 1993, shows San Francisco transformed into an ecological utopia but threatened by a militaristic southern society.
These books share solarpunk's concern with imagining concrete alternatives to industrial capitalism, showing not just that another world is possible but what that world might actually look like in daily life.
The first explicitly solarpunk publications were short story anthologies: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World appeared in Brazil in 2012, followed by Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragons Anthology in 2015, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation in 2017, and Glass and Gardens in 2018.
The genre achieved broader visibility when Becky Chambers, already an award-winning science fiction author, published two solarpunk novellas through Tor Books: A Psalm for the Wild-Built in 2021 and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy in 2022. These books follow a monk named Sibling Dex—the character uses gender-neutral pronouns, reflecting solarpunk's frequent engagement with themes of gender equality and fluidity—who travels through a world where humanity and robots have gone their separate ways after robots gained consciousness and chose to live in the wild.
The Risk of Greenwashing
Adam Flynn, the researcher who helped define solarpunk in its early years, has also been one of its most thoughtful critics.
His concern is that solarpunk aesthetics can be adopted without solarpunk politics—that developers can build luxury condominiums with green roofs and living walls, charge premium rents, displace existing communities, and call the result "sustainable" or even "solarpunk." The appearance of environmental responsibility without the substance.
This is not a hypothetical concern. In cities around the world, "green" buildings have become marketing tools for luxury real estate. A tower wrapped in plants looks progressive and ecological, but if it prices out working-class residents and accelerates gentrification, its environmental credentials are questionable at best. The embodied carbon in new construction, the displacement of communities, the destruction of existing buildings that could have been renovated—these factors often outweigh whatever benefits come from solar panels and green roofs.
Flynn calls this "fake solarpunk urbanism." It has the aesthetic trappings of the movement without its commitment to social justice, community control, and systemic change. True solarpunk, in his view, requires attention to who benefits from sustainable development and who bears its costs.
Nature in Science Fiction
A 2019 study examined the 44 most popular American science fiction films and found something striking: nature was almost entirely absent from their visions of the future.
When nature appeared at all, it was as background—decorative lawns, ornamental gardens, perhaps a park. Nature was never shown integrated with human civilization in innovative ways, never depicted as central to how future cities might function. The future, in mainstream science fiction, is almost always concrete, steel, and glass.
This matters because our visions of the future shape what we build. If every science fiction film shows cities as nature-free zones, architects and urban planners absorb that assumption. The study's authors called for artists to "collaborate to imagine how to integrate nature and biodiversity into the depictions of future cities."
Solarpunk is, in part, an answer to that call.
The Optimism Problem
There's a criticism sometimes leveled at solarpunk: that optimism about the future is a form of denial, that the only honest response to climate change is despair or rage.
Solarpunk's proponents argue the opposite. They point out that cynicism and despair, while understandable, tend toward paralysis. If the future is already lost, why bother trying to change it? Doomerism becomes its own kind of denial—a refusal to engage with the possibility that human action might matter.
The word "hopepunk" is sometimes used alongside solarpunk to describe this orientation. Where grimdark fantasy and dystopian fiction derive their power from depicting worlds without hope, hopepunk and solarpunk insist that hope itself is a form of resistance. Not naive optimism that ignores problems, but deliberate hope in the face of acknowledged difficulties.
This connects to a concept in psychology called "self-efficacy"—the belief that your actions can make a difference. Studies consistently show that people who believe they can influence outcomes are more likely to take action, while those who feel powerless tend toward inaction even when action is possible. Solarpunk deliberately cultivates self-efficacy, showing futures that were built rather than arrived at passively.
The Maker-Hero
Cyberpunk gave us the hacker—a protagonist who works alone or in small groups, infiltrating systems built by others, stealing information, disrupting power structures from the shadows. The hacker is skilled but marginalized, fighting against systems too large to defeat.
Solarpunk's archetypal protagonist is different: the maker-hero. This is someone who builds rather than hacks, who creates new systems rather than exploiting existing ones. The maker-hero has often witnessed environmental disaster or the failure of central authorities, and responds not with cynical withdrawal but with practical construction of alternatives.
This archetype reflects solarpunk's emphasis on prefigurative politics and the do-it-yourself ethos. The maker-hero doesn't wait for permission or resources from above. They work with what's available, often in community with others, building the future piece by piece.
Why This Matters for AI Discourse
There's an interesting parallel between solarpunk and discussions about artificial intelligence.
Much AI discourse follows a cyberpunk pattern: technology is depicted as an unstoppable force that will transform society in ways humans cannot control. The future is something that happens to us, not something we build. Whether the prediction is optimistic (AI will solve all our problems) or pessimistic (AI will destroy us), the underlying assumption is the same: technology drives history, and humans are along for the ride.
Solarpunk offers a different frame. Technology is a tool—powerful, potentially dangerous, but ultimately shaped by human choices about how to develop and deploy it. The future is not predetermined. It will be built by people making decisions, and those decisions are influenced by what futures we can imagine.
This is why fiction matters. Not because stories directly change policy, but because they expand or constrain what we can envision. A culture saturated in dystopian narratives will struggle to imagine alternatives. A culture that includes solarpunk alongside its warnings might find it easier to ask: what do we actually want technology to do? And how do we build systems that serve human flourishing rather than just accumulating power?
Solarpunk doesn't promise that everything will be fine. It promises that everything is still being decided.