Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

'Solarpunk' is a transmedial genre of speculative fiction, and a real-world subculture, that aims to depict and enact utopian sustainable futures. The genre has attracted interest from energy humanities scholars, as many solarpunk stories depict societies transitioning from fossil fuel dependency to solar-energy technologies. The ‘punk’ suffix can thereby be construed in relation to solar technology’s affordances for decentralised  energy infrastructures via community-owned arrays. In some stories, solarpunk’s activist characters and ethic of interdependence co-exist uneasily with its potential to perpetuate techno-fetishism, through solar imaginaries which occlude the extractive manufacturing processes of solar panels and batteries. Despite and alongside this, the elemental imagery of solarpunk stories draws attention gently back to an attentive engagement with sources and supply chains. To illuminate these tensions, I invite the reader to reflect on their embodied encounters with the sun: its cycles of rising and setting, slow ebbs and flows of light and energy, and our ecological dependence on photosynthetic plants, counterposed with its lethality in the escalating temperatures of the climate crisis. Fundamentally, I argue that a straightforward identification of the ‘solar’ in solarpunk with contemporary solar technology is reductive, and overlooks the wide range of ways in which solarpunk stories address and represent the sun, the relationalities it unfolds, and its capacity to subvert what is considered technological progress. 

Keywords: solarpunk, energy humanities, speculative fiction, solar energy, energy transition, science fiction, contemporary literature, solarity, environmental humanities