Feeling Solarpunk

“Chambers’s Monk and Robot duology, the first half of which won a Hugo Award, popularizes solarpunk, a genre that, according to Stacey Balkan, “[advances] a liberatory politics that marshals solar power” and whose characters “inhabit convivial spaces where historically marginalized communities and a nonhuman landscape […] live in economic harmony.””

“The series, however, offers no blueprint for how to arrive at that utopia, unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s techno-bureaucratic cli-fi or the bloody oral histories imagined in Everything for Everyone’s postrevolutionary New York commune”

“Chambers simply tells us that “[t]his had been the way of things since the Transition,” after all machines spontaneously and mysteriously came to consciousness—and fled”

“Left to their own devices and in need of a reset, “the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature”—evocative of Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s “half-earth socialism.””

“Chambers starts her story on Panga centuries after this Transition: human society has already been built for radical sustainability (out of “translucent casein and mycelium masonry”) and democratic governance (with leaderless village “councils”), and nature has been left to heal itself”

“Out of that rewilded nature comes Mosscap, the solar-powered robot elected to reestablish human contact with one small question: “What do humans need?””

“Should I distrust my reception of Chambers’s sunny postcard from the future?”

“My poetry and personal essays feel like kindling for the burning world”

“You are allowed to just live.

Oh, adamant Mosscap, mouth full of italics”

“I can’t help but feel Dex’s same compulsion, ethical and/or existential, to do more than just live—as much as I would prefer only to marvel at literature and the light through leaves”

“As I glut myself on oil, electricity, and cobalt, I’m wary of solarpunk as my guiltiest pleasure, an escapism that papers over the violent inequities I profit off of uncountably, right now”

“despair isn’t the only affect available to us. Rebecca Solnit is, like Mosscap, quite adamant on this point, tirelessly reiterating that “climate despair is a luxury” no one can afford. “For those of us whose lives are already easy,” she writes, “giving up means making life even easier, at least in terms of effort. For the directly impacted, it means surrendering to devastation. Giving up on their behalf is not solidarity.””

“Though Mosscap’s just-live logic may hold in Panga’s utopian future, it falls short in our all-but-dystopian present, where combining solidarity and struggle is our only shot at progress”

“Though we don’t walk away with a blueprint for our Transition, we do glimpse how it might feel to live in its wake”