William Gibson interviewed by Abraham Riesman, “William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias,” Vulture, August 1, 2017, ➝.
Belinda Goldsmith, “William Gibson says reality has become sci-fi,” Reuters, August 7, 2007, ➝. See also: Brady Gerber, “Dystopia for Sale,” Literary Hub, February 8, 2018, ➝. “Whatever your biggest concern—political polarization, climate change, the oppression of people of color and women, the unchecked evolution of technology—there’s a nightmarish fictionalized future already waiting for you. And if you want to be really informed, you can surround yourself with every potential bleak outcome. Everyone is allowed their own dystopia; they’re as easy to personalize as an iTunes playlist.”
Ben Valentine, “Solarpunk wants to save the world,” Hopes&Fears, August 28, 2015, ➝.
For dragons, see: Claudie Arseneault, Wings of Renewal (2017), ➝.
This diversity is endemic to the tumblrverse, but of course subcultures have always had factions (steampunk had its “tribes” too). See: “Steampunk Tribes,” Steampunk Scholar, March 5, 2017, ➝.
Claire L. Evans, “Does Future Fact Depend on Present Fiction?” uncube, March 11, 2014, ➝.
Project Hieroglyph recently released a book entitled Stories & Visions for a Better Future, ➝. It’s important to note that many authors mentioned in this essay do not claim the genre title of Solarpunk—any more than William Gibson waved the Cyberpunk flag, which he did not. Genre titles are often retroactively bestowed upon production that had no intention of being genre fiction of that sort. Over time, as a set of tropes emerge and coalesce, other production may pick up and carry the mantle, explicitly aiming to write or make within the genre ceonventions that have developed.
Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,” World Policy Journal (2011) 28(3), ➝.
See also: David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler, March 2012, ➝.
Miss Olivia Louise, "Here’s a thing I’ve had around in my head for a while!," Land of Masks and Jewels, 2015, ➝.
“Steampunk, which has been both upheld as a ideological movement and downplayed as an apolitical fashion trend, is only as politically substantial as people make it to be.” “Politics in Steampunk–A Sampling (aka “Why it Matters”),” Beyond Victoriana, April 6, 2013, ➝.
That is, although “steampunk enthusiasts like the grandeur of the British Empire,” they are not necessarily “willing to accept the racism and colonialism upon which it was built.” From: Mike Dieter Perschon, The Steampunk Aesthetic: Technofantasies in a Neo-Victorian Retrofuture, Doctor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, Fall 2012, Edmonton, Alberta.
V. Vale, phone interview, April 2017.
Perschon, The Steampunk Aesthetic.
Margaret Killjoy, “Steampunk Will Never Be Afraid Of Politics,” Tor, October 3, 2011. ➝.
Mary Woodbury, “Interview with Adam Flynn on Solarpunk,” Eco-fiction, July 2, 2014, ➝.
Ken Butti and John Perlin, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1980). “Time after time, scarcities of fuel have stimulated the search for energy alternatives—spurring advances in solar architecture and technology. But when people discovered abundant new sources of fuel, solar energy became ‘uneconomical’ and dropped from sight.” Thank you to Jay Springett for pointing me toward this book.
Ibid.
See Nicholas Korody, “Mere Decorating,” e-flux Architecture, November 20, 2017, ➝.
Mouchot’s engine was powered by a water-filled glass container heated by the sun until it boiled. See: Butti and Perlin, A Golden Thread.
See: Fezzioui Naïma et al., “The Traditional House with Horizontal Opening: A Trend towards Zero-energy House in the Hot, Dry Climates,” Energy Procedia, Vol. 96, September 2016, ➝; Maatouk Khoukhi and Naïma Fezzioui, “Thermal comfort design of traditional houses in hot dry region of Algeria,” International Journal of Energy and Environmental Engineering, December 2012, 3:5, ➝.
McKenzie Wark, Anthropocene Lecture Series, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, May 18, 2017, ➝.
Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, ed., Solarpunk: Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em um Mundo Sustenavel (São Paulo: Editora Draco, 2012).
Andrew Dana Hudson, “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk,” Medium, October 14, 2015, ➝.
William Gibson Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells, The Paris Review, Summer 2011, ➝.
For more on E.Chromi, see Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and James King, E. chromi, 2009, ➝.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009).
Jason Kehe, “Sci-fi, Dystopia, and Hope in the Age of Trump: A Fiction Roundtable,” Wired, July 4, 2017, ➝.
Jared Sexton Interviewed by Daniel Barber, “On Black Negativity,” Society and Space, September 18, 2017, ➝.
Jill Lepore, “A Golden Age for Utopian Fiction,” New Yorker, May 29, 2017. “Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines. But utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best… There are a lot of problems in writing utopias, but they can be opportunities. The political attacks {against utopian fiction} are interesting to parse. ‘Utopia would be boring because there would be no conflicts, history would stop, there would be no great art, no drama, no magnificence.’ This is always said by white people with a full belly. My feeling is that if they were hungry and sick and living in a cardboard shack they would be more willing to give utopia a try.” Terry Bisson, “Galileo’s Dream: A Q&A with Kim Stanley Robinson,” Shareable, November 4, 2009, ➝.
There is a lot to be gained here from the scholarship on the conjoined concepts of Afro-pessimism and black optimism. In this context Fred Moten describes “the infinitesimal difference between pessimism and optimism”: a difference arrived at not through opposition but something more like double-negation. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh), The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013.
Positions is an initiative of e-flux Architecture.