One of my ongoing goals in the solarpunk genre/movement is to start a bit of a culture of packaging up and sharing writer-level research to make writing solarpunk easier. Writers often need a level of detail that’s hard to find in publications - news articles and pop science stuff tends to be too broad and lacking in specific detail (or incorrect) while industry publications tend to go in depth on a narrow slice of a topic, assuming the reader has the baseline knowledge to put it in context (I usually end up muddling through a lot of these trying to build a working understanding).
I started by organizing my own project research into easy building blocks for other writers and artists but the mods of the writing community have agreed to use their built-in wiki to host these resources, to make something bigger, more comprehensive, and more open to the community at large!
I think a part of the reason there’s not a ton of writers in the genre yet is that there’s a high barrier for entry. Changing genres is already fairly difficult and requires a lot of reading and research, but on top of that, aspirational fiction is hard. If you’re trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting, and that requires so much more knowledge to do well.
Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permiculture practices, phytoremediation, modern airship design and operations, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there’s both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you’re writing in a dystopian setting and it’s pretty easy to see the difference.
And a lot of the information you need isn’t generally widely known yet, and it’s often intensely siloed into several different fields or communities. Just finding out that you should include a specific technology or practice or viewpoint in your story can be a hurdle (we don’t always know what we don’t know), and building up a good enough working knowledge within that field to write it adds even more difficulty.
I think as solarpunk accretes more of a collection of works and a presence in the culture, this’ll get easier. Core knowledge will sort of keep bubbling to the surface until we have a sort of layperson’s understanding that certain broad solarpunk domains go with the tropes and aesthetic. But I also think we have a great opportunity to speed up canonization of the topics and themes and tech and practices we care about by collecting and packaging them in a way that makes including them easy for writers and artists. Sort of an onboarding kit or similar.
So basically if you want to see something in the genre, make it easy to write it! Gather up examples and details in one place. I’ve gathered most topics I’ve researched for previous projects into the wiki, and I’m hoping to do posts on phytoremediation and on airships next, but I’m just one person with very specific interests and some pretty significant blind spots (especially on the community and anarchism side). One of my big goals for this project is for it to take on input from many more people, both in additions to existing pages and in brand new topics I don’t know enough about to write up.
Like I said in the wiki itself, any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.
Unfortunately the docuwiki system only allows for community moderators to make edits, but feel free to post in the community or message me with anything you want to add and I’ll be happy to change it over to docuwiki’s markup and add it!
The stuff you’ve put up so far looks great! This is a wonderful initiative.
Thank you so much! I’d actually been thinking about reaching out to you and some of the folks on /c/anarchism to see if you were interested in adding anything on the community and organizational side of solarpunk - I think I’ve picked up (barely) enough to write it my own stories but I definitely don’t know enough to write up a guide for others.
Either way, thanks! I hope it’ll do some good!
So basically if you want to see something in the genre, make it easy to write it! Gather up examples and details in one place.
Like I said in the wiki itself, any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.
I like what you say.
The thing is that the way I do my research and take notes is analog, pen on paper. All my notes are ‘stored’ on (recycled) sheet of paper that I cut to A6 size. They are then indexed by themes and names, on other A6-sized recycled sheets that I use as the entry point to later be to explore my notes when I need to find informations.
It works really well, it also fully respects my privacy (and freedom) while it wastes no energy or resources. It’s dead simple to use (pen+paper) and as simple to enrich and to ‘maintain’ (I’ve never needed to ‘clean it’ in order to remove useless content: that content just sits there unused, forgotten, while the more active content will naturally expand thanks to constant inflow of new notes and of new links between notes. It’s very much organic, like growing plants.
I really think it’s a fine system and have zero desire to make it digital, but then I don’t see an easy way to share my notes or to make them collaborative… online at least, as I can easily work around the same stack of cards with another person I would invite home.
