Instead of following the same development path of Europe and North America, parts of Africa are charting a different course. One built around grassroots clean energy generation, ecological restoration and community empowerment. Could Africa leapfrog the West by skipping its legacy infrastructure and mindsets that might make it harder to build a more solarpunk society? Could this continent lead us all into a deliciously sustainable future?

SolarPunk Pro argues that at least Uganda might be doing just that. In this recent video he explains how rural areas waiting for decades for centralised electric infrastructure to arrive have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve been building out their own local solar power.

As we have already shared in ’s excellent post about similar developments in South Africa, this holds the promise of localised, clean-energy systems that can enrich communities in a way that the more centralised electricity grids of the West just aren’t designed to do.

It’s not only the African countryside that’s been embracing green energy generation. As the African Youtuber Gano Did It explains in this video, manufacturing businesses in Zimbabwe have been investing in solar power for their factories. This is primarily because generating their own electricity from the sun combined with battery storage is much more reliable than Harare’s sketchy power grid.

Factory owners in the video also explain other benefits of investing in their own solar power. It’s cheaper and also means they are helping the local and global environment by not using electricity derived from dirty coal or diesel-powered backup generators for when the grid regularly goes down.

Zooming in to the hyper local, we can see places like The Bekezela Solarpunk Community Hub in South Africa. This was created by a community activist and professional solar installer, with the brilliant name of Sunny Morgan as well as the Buckland brothers, Luke and Daniel.

According to this this Afrika Burn piece, they have installed solar panels and batteries to power a solarpunk community centre in Johannesburg. The hub can charge people’s electronic devices for free, has a Raspberry Pi computer, hard drive and WiFi router. This kit is supposed to, “provide an open-access digital commons, including a neighbourhood chat server for communication and collaboration”.

This solarpunk community hub also provides rechargeable lamps, a recharging station for them, as well as a book and video library. Sunny and the Buckland boys have been directly inspired by the solarpunk movement to create this community resource. They hope to scale it in the future across South Africa and beyond.

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Africa is showing how the rest of the world might solarpunk in other ways than getting power from the sun.

In this recent Substack, makes the case for why he thinks Rwanda’s capital is an example of solarpunk urbanism. He mentions things such as how it’s been illegal to register fossil-fuel motorbikes since 2025, digital government making it easier for people to build housing but most of all an urban wetland park in the middle of the city.

Sam waxes lyrical about how lush, verdant and full of wildlife the Nyandungu park in Kigali is. As well as providing an urban ‘nature bath’ this space is an example of sponge-city design. The wetlands can absorb flood water stopping the surrounding urban areas from being deluged.

Sam also writes about Rwanda’s massive strides in terms of human development, child education, electrification and more leading to it being called ‘the Singapore of Africa’. He’s right to point out this is especially impressive considering the country suffered one of the worst genocides of the 20^th Century.

Having said all that, Sam doesn’t shy away from raising questions about how democratic the Rwandan government is. Paul Kagame has been Rwandan president for 26 years and won his last election with 99% of the vote. Sam’s also critical of its military interventions in its neighbours, especially the Democratic Republic of Congo. All in all it’s a really interesting perspective and worth checking out.

The ever excellent Andrew Millison has done a nice video about how the Great Green Wall of Africa is not only trying to turn the desert green, it may also be helping solve conflicts between farmers and herders.

Andrew explains how the growth of the Sahara had led to violent disputes between nomads and more settled peoples as arable land shrank due to climate change. Using low tech half-moon water harvesting structures, a combination of the government, NGOs and local communities are restoring the land and building peace at the same time.

So is Africa leapfrogging the West to become a solarpunk continent? Only time will tell. What we know for sure is that these examples help us feel a deliciously sustainable future for us all is that much more possible.

What do you think? Which of these are your favourite projects? Which have inspired you the most? Which do you think countries in the rest of the world can learn from? What solarpunky style things in Africa have we missed? Let us know in the comments below.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

We start off in New York, where Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers invite you to We Demand Stories: Dreams Without Boundaries Solarpunk and Hopepunk Futures on 20th June 2026 3:30–6:30pm at 314 Dean St.

This event will feature speakers including our friend Rob Cameron, as well as Andrea Hairston and Micaiah Johnson. They will talk about their belief that the future is made by our choices and we can devise maps for the worlds we want.

🎟️ Buy tickets for the event here.

Also in NYC, Solarpunk artist Olalekan Jeyifous has created Ancestral Ecologies, on view at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from 23rd May – 25th October 2026. This exhibition features four multi-sensory installations exploring animist frameworks through environmental and material phenomena. The work draws on ancient African beliefs that see matter, memory and multispecies forces as interconnected. For more information click here.

Two San Francisco solarpunk events

Hiking to a Bright Future Together

For those who are up for a bit of a trek, this is a vigorous walk for solarpunks and changemakers on 14th June and 26th July.

The group meets at 3pm at the Legion of Honor steps (where the parking lot meets the walkway) to walk, talk and explore how to collectively build a brighter future. The organisers say hiking’s natural rhythm makes for great collaborative and improvisational conversation.

Please RSVP so the organisers know to look out for you.

The Future of Social Innovation — Solarpunk, Regenerative Futures & Systems Change

Bobby Fishkin and Andres Acosta host an informal solarpunk gathering at SF Green House, an indoor public open space (POPO) at 55 2nd St.

Systems-change agents, regenerative builders, artists and innovators are invited to drop in anytime 2–5pm 6th August, or 1st October for open conversation, radical collaboration and regenerative dreaming.

At 5pm, the group plans to head outside to join the 2nd Street block party involving free music, art, and community celebration.

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Solarpunks in Reading, England

Solarpunk collective Commando Jugendstil are building Reading’s most exciting new public artwork. They are making an interactive solar-powered mural that sees you. They need your ideas to make it happen.

Join the creative process:

11 June 11:30am–1pm

Whitley Community Hub Café, Reading, RG2 7QA

This is community art, made by the community. Don’t just watch it happen, help build it.

For more info contact Commando Jugendstil on their Instagram.

Our friends from the London School of Solarpunk are also heading to Reading, to host a Solarpunk Creative Writing Workshop 14th June 10am.

They are inviting filmmakers, writers, artists and storytellers to imagine everyday life in a better future. Through creative prompts and structured exercises, participants will explore climate change, social transformation and hopeful futures. All this is with the aim of sparking new scripts, stories and collaborations.

Afterwards, participants are welcome to head to Forbury Gardens for climate-friendly food at Big Lunch Reading 2026 (11:30am-3:30pm).

This event is part of Reading Climate Festival 2026.

What do you think?

Would you like to go to any of the above? Which ones?

Are there any solarpunk events coming up in the next few months that we’ve missed?

Let us know in the comments below.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

We know that the Man of Steel gains his powers from the sun, fights for justice and has sought to eliminate things like nuclear weapons but is he solarpunk?

Probably not, but Gabriel Rizzo has written a very personal, thought-provoking post we really enjoyed about how things Superman has said have helped him escape cynicism and despair to become more solarpunk. You can read the full piece here.

A solarpunk sketch every day

has set herself the challenge of making a piece of solarpunk art every day this month. Check out the roundups of what she made for week one and week two and the rest on her notes.

Solarpunking Washington this Climate Week

Our friends at have written a great post “Who has the right to the future?” which really chimes with our manifesto point ‘Yes to Tech, No to Technocracy’. They also list great-looking events happening this DC Climate Week.

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Links

• First Steps to Finding the Solarpunk Campus - Agartha One

• Landscape Architecture - A Foot into Solarpunk - Yohann Marquez

• 19 Cities Including London, San Francisco, Hong Kong Achieve ‘Remarkable Reductions’ in Air Pollution - Good News Network

• Britain breaks solar energy record twice as UK’s biggest solar farm gets approval - The Guardian

• Amid an energy crisis, the renewables juggernaut gathers pace - Positive News

• Saudi Arabia’s Radical Water Solution - Andrew Millison

• Small Modular NUCLEAR Reactors. Climate Solution or Costly Distraction? - Just Have a Think

• Biaural Progressive Organic Mantra House Set | Solarpunk Music Festival 2026 PH - Monica Mingoa

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Two weeks off

Part of building a deliciously sustainable future is sustaining ourselves, so I’m planning to keep screen-time to a minimum over the next fortnight. That means I’m unlikely to be picking up messages or comments during that time. I’ll aim to read and respond on the other side :)

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The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

After 4 years working away to produce fortnightly posts we’re celebrating our 100^th SolarPunk Stories Substack!

To mark the occasion we’re sharing a selection of some of our favourites with you below. We especially hope that the thousands of new readers who have joined us over the past couple of years will find some of the older gems delightful.

Defining Solaprunk

The best place to start is by describing what solarpunk is and why it matters. We recently updated our main introductory piece about this What is solarpunk, one vision or many worlds?.

You might also enjoy Protopia or utopia? Which is more solarpunk? and Is ruin porn solarpunk?

Movement

One thing that sets solarpunk apart from other genres is that it comes with a community for change. Two of our favourite pieces highlighting the broader solarpunk tribe are Black solarpunks celebration and Solarpunk school is in session. The second of these was about the launch of the London School of Solarpunk just over a year ago. Since then they’ve put on a whole host of awesome IRL events from their base in Tottenham. You can find out more about them here.

One of the most important things about solarpunk is it can inspire people to take action to make a deliciously sustainable world a reality.

To that end we recommend reading Solarpunks of the world unite which is about the role of the international trade union movement in helping ensure a just transition to a greener, fairer future. Another good one is Solarpunks for a 3 day weekend from 2022 which encouraged supporting the 4 day week campaign. Since then they have gone from strength to strength in the UK and there is also a sister campaign in the U.S.

Fiction

If you’re looking for a way in to solarpunk fiction the Solarpunk starter reading list has five texts to help get you going with our genre. For a taste of something we made ourselves, there’s a free extract from Solarpunk Detective #1. We’ve got more of these thrilling tales from better futures drafted and are looking for help to get them published. More on that in an upcoming post.

TV and Movies

On the small screen the show we have done the most to champion is Moonhaven. In spite of its lunar title, we feel this is The most solarpunk TV show you’ve never seen and it’s now on Netlfix. Check our post for why you should watch, re-watch and share this awesome series as much as possible. Is Scavenger’s Reign solarpunk? was our exploration of another breathtakingly brilliant TV series.

We’ve done 6 solarpunk movie reviews so far. The one that received the most engagement from lovely readers like you, was an attempt by Disney at our genre that flopped so hard we called the post Solarpunk disaster? We explored if its failure means our genre is doomed to remain niche?

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Videogames

Solarpunk videogames galore is a roundup of ways you can interact with building a deliciously sustainable future through play. This post included an AR game, by our solarpunk sister Kalpana Arias, that aims to help make grey spaces green in reality.

Then we had an exclusive chat with the creator of Future? No Thanks! which is A Solarpunk videogame laughing its way towards a better tomorrow. This is basically a protopian manifesto disguised as a laugh-out-loud sandbox adventure game.

Finally there’s Starship solarpunk, an interview with the creators of Generation Exile. We discovered this city-building game set among the stars acts as an ‘immersive metaphor’ for how we might solarpunk spaceship Earth.

And loads more

These are just a small sample of the 100 Substacks we’ve done so far. In the archive we’ve got gems about solarpunk music, art, travel,comic books, weirdness, sharing gardens, tree towers, surveys and so much more. Browse at your leisure here.

What are your favourites?

Which of our Substacks have you most enjoyed over the years? Is it one that we’ve chosen to highlight here or one we missed from this round-up?

What type of stuff would you like to see more of for our next century of posts? Let us know in the comments below.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

What happens when solarpunk stops being an aesthetic and starts plugging into the wall?

That is the promise of balcony solar. A fast-growing movement in Germany and a still contested idea in the United States, where the legal barriers have been high but things are beginning to shift.

Balcony solar are panels you can attach with zip-ties and plug in to your home electric system. They can be as cheap as $400, be bought in IKEA in Europe and start saving money off your bills straight away. They seem like a no-brainer but even in green-leaning Germany they weren’t legal just a decade ago. This was because of concerns of the influx of electricity into home systems potentially causing electrical fires, or energy feeding back into local grids and unbalancing them.

Campaigning by “relentless individuals” in Germany was key, according to Christian Ofenheusle, founder of Berlin-based EmpowerSource as reported by Canary Media. Years of patient, persistent effort helped convince German policy makers to overcome the unjustified fears of electrical fires and remove legal barriers to balcony solar.

Ofenheusle and fellow advocates went on to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices and enshrine renters legal right to balcony solar. Cities like Berlin and Munich have also provided millions of euros in subsidies. As a result of this combination of activists, solar industry lobbyists and politicians working together around 4 million households in Germany have embraced Balkonkraftwerk (balcony power plants).

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For this grassroots energy revolution to come to the U.S. it needs its own relentless individuals. Lauren Phillips in the Bronx looks like exactly that kind of pioneer. As reported by Reasons to be Cheerful, she has plugged a 220-watt panel into her balcony railing. She calls it “solar civil disobedience” as she is operating without utility permission in a regulatory grey area. As a third-generation Bronx resident, hospitalised with asthma last year, she sees every panel as a step toward justice for a community that has long lived with excessively dirty air.

While it may not yet be legal in New York to install your own balcony solar, this month Virginia gained bipartisan support to legalise it, becoming the second U.S. state to do so. More than two dozen others have legislation in the works to make it legal too. If you are a resident of one these states consider contacting your representatives to indicate your support and / or help local campaigns to get these bills passed.

The German story tells us exactly what is possible when pioneers, politicians and policy align. It took less than a decade to go from a regulatory tweak to 4 million households. With the support of more ‘relentless individuals’ hopefully the U.S will become a big balcony solar success story too.

Would you get solar panels on your balcony? Have you been involved in any campaigning to make them legal where you are? Let us know in the comments below.

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Two nice solarpunk shout-outs

Julia Reingold cited SolarPunk Stories as one of the two top resources for solarpunk in the original Instagram caption of this fantastic little video.

Mother Jones has also done a better than average introduction to solarpunk in this article. In particular they acknowledge there are different types of solarpunk, like we have in our solarpunk shades piece.

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Links

• Which of These Will Be the Next Planty Wonder of the World? — Thursd

• From Plumber To Parliament, Why Green Party’s Hannah Spencer Is The Hope UK Politics Needs Right Now — Elle UK

• Solarpunk Returns to Phnom Penh, Reimagining A Greener Future Through Art — Kiri Post

• Special bricks to help birds put in every new home in Scotland — BBC Newsround

• The Canadian entrepreneur venturing into the world’s last frontiers with solar airships — The Globe and Mail

• ‘We can learn from the old’: how architects are returning to the earth to build homes for the future — The Guardian

• From war zones to city plots, grassroots growers are transforming land and lives — Positive News

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The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

Taylor Seamount does these really awesome oil paintings that envision how real places might look if they were solarpunked. We had a chat with Taylor about her work below.

What’s your background?

I grew up in Santa Cruz, CA, where I live now and which is the setting of most of my speculative art. My dad, an industrial physicist in Silicon Valley, was always introducing us to cutting-edge technology. My family encouraged my fascination with science, although I primarily saw myself as an artist. I studied physics and biochemistry at UC Davis, earning a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

After college, I spent five years in Seattle making surrealist paintings while working as a math and science tutor. Eventually, I returned to school to study painting at the Mark Kang-O’Higgins Modern Painting Atelier. During that time I developed a disabling chronic illness and later moved back home to Santa Cruz.

With my world largely confined to my parents’ neighborhood at the wild-urban interface, I became fascinated by the local ecology. That curiosity led me to earn my UC California Naturalists Certification.

How did you get into Plein Air painting?

I became interested in plein air – painting landscapes outdoors from life – when I read Color and Light, by James Gurney, best known for Dinotopia. At the time, I had a strong desire to make my surrealist scenes feel real, like the fantasy scenes of James Gurney’s work. In the book, Gurney insists that studying light outdoors is essential to mastering light in imaginative landscapes.

Why are you solarpunk?

Growing up, I was impacted by both Silicon Valley tech culture and Santa Cruz’s 1990s hippy culture. The hippies warned of the environmental destruction by “the system,” but didn’t give a clear picture of an alternative. The techies enthusiastically promised environmental fixes but didn’t acknowledge the misguided incentives of capitalism. Despite my intense attachment to environmental issues, I ended up paralyzed by a sense that the world’s demise was inevitable.

That was until I started learning from anthropology, people’s histories, and Indigenous perspectives. I learned that, when it comes to human society, the organisational possibilities are far more vast than I had been taught. I began following local Indigenous leaders and became engrossed by visionary fiction. My understanding of the present became clearer, and my vision for the future began to open up.

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When I discovered solarpunk, it felt like I had found a thematic home for the art I wanted to create. Portraying technology, both ancient and modern, in service of a just and ecologically sustainable society. Practicing solarpunk has transformed the doomer in me. By sharing this work, I hope to help transform that feeling in others.

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Which solarpunk artwork are you most proud of and why?

I’m most proud of my piece Phoenix Village. My shade of solarpunk is definitely Rooted and this is a piece deeply rooted in my local community. Not only was it one of my first collaborations with a local activist, but it also spoke directly to local public policy and history. Each of my projects is a balance between the playful joy of worldbuilding and useful commentary on current issues. I think this piece did that well.

Tell us more about your other solarpunk projects please

Solarpunk Pen Pals is a writing game that I developed with solarpunk author Todd Medema. The game has you imagine your community 20 years in the future during a solarpunk transition. You draw cards with worldbuilding and character elements that help you brainstorm details about the world and create a character in it. You and a partner then write each other letters as your characters. The game borrows the playing cards from the Solarpunk RPG.

It’s been inspiring seeing how uplifted people are by the activity. Participants often come up with imaginative solutions to local issues in the process.

Why does green technology tend to be the backdrop rather than the focus of your solarpunk work?

My proximity to Silicon Valley makes me want to respond to the “technology will save us” mindset. I see the climate crisis as a systems failure rather than a technological one. I want to communicate my perspective that green technology will only be reliably implemented in beneficial ways in a truly democratic post-capitalist system.

What else would you like our solarpunk readers to know?

Look through more of my work at taylorseamount.com and sign up for my mailing list to be the first to see my new projects!

Prints available on my Etsy.

Support me, get work-in-progress updates, and download my Solarpunk Anti-Goalsetting Worksheet on Ko-Fi or Patreon.

I am @taylorseamount on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Instagram.

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The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

One of the most popular solarpunk images is taking off in reality. The first recorded mention of solarpunk was in this 2008 blog. The author was inspired by the conceptual image of a cargo ship being pulled by a huge modern kite.

Following on from that the Jessica Woulfe’s artwork depicting blimp turbines (pictured above) won the Atomhawk solarpunk art competition in 2019. Since then Airborne Wind Energy Systems or AWES (love this acronym!) have become some of the most popular solarpunk imagery.

Many have thought this was just a protopian dream but as Matt Ferell explored in this recent video, AWES are getting much closer to reality. As Matt explains, a flying turbine has been successfully deployed by the company Kitepower in Ireland, poweringing the local town of Bangor.

These types of AWES generate more energy from the higher altitude wind they are blown by. The cables attaching the kite to the ground are pulled back and forth by their movements power a dynamo at their base.

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They can be deployed in much smaller areas that conventional wind turbines and set up in a fraction of the time, as little as 24 hours. While still in the early stages they show a lot of promise, especially for those areas where it’s impractical or uneconomic to fit a conventional wind turbine.

The type of floating blimp windmills that you see in solarpunk art, like this recent animated short, are called Buoyant Air Turbines or BATs (more acronym bliss!). Chinese startup SAWES has launched a prototype which they claim can produce 1 megawatt of energy and overcome the teething problems other such BATs have faced in the past.

Airborne wind energy will be featuring in an upcoming episode of SolarPunk Detective. Stay subscribed to catch it when it takes flight.

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Solarpunky Roundup

• The Punk Rockers: Cypherpunks, Solarpunks & Afrofuturists - Purple Pages

• Build, Don’t Escape – A Solarpunk Hands-On Workshop - Alex Jurj

• The Solarpunk Urbanism of Shenzhen - Climate Act Now (Substack)

• How communities are stepping up to revive our tired towns and cities - Positive News

• Many people are individually optimistic but think the world is falling apart -

• Africa: Regenerative Agriculture Yields Big Wins for Farmers and Climate in Eastern Kenya - Agribusiness Global

• Cooling paint also harvests water - Cooling Post

• How the Netherlands (accidentally) Moved to a 4 Day Week - YouTube

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The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

A solarpunk retrofitted building is so epic it has ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s because it’s got the world’s largest solar mural on its side. The artwork covering the Sunrise Building in Edmonton, Canada, incorporates solar panels providing clean energy and saving money for the residents.

The solarpunk aspects of this project don’t stop there. According to Nice News, the 1970s block required extensive improvements to make it liveable for renters today. Rather than tearing it down, the real estate investment trust Avenue Living partnered with the Mitrex solar panel company to gave it a green renovation. Repurposing and augmenting what we’ve already got rather than demolishing and building from scratch is very much the Rooted shade of solarpunk we favour at SolarPunk Stories.

Indigenous artist Lance Cardinal worked with local artists to create the 85-foot-tall mural “The Land We Share”. In this Instagram video he explains how it celebrates the First Nations and Chinese heritage of people living in that part of Edmonton. The mural shows 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac living in harmony with the seven animals that symbolise the Cree sacred grandfather teachings. Cardinal says,

“The different teachings and ideals represented by these 19 animals help us see the world in a better way. To be respectful of each other and to understand each other’s differences and of course to take care of Mother Earth.”

We’d love to see more solar murals like this across our cities in towns in the future. What do you think of The Sunrise Building and The Land We Share mural? Which buildings would you like to see transformed with public, even solar art? Let us know in the comments below.

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Solarpunk Round-up

• How To Start Your Solarpunk Fashion Wardrobe: Making Solarpunk Fashion A Reality - The Future Of Clothes

• SOLARPUNK cities: Singapore - SOLARPUNK cities

• SolarPunk Is The Future We Actually Want - KINGxNEPTUNE

• 2025 buzzwords: Solarpunk and Agentic AI. What do they mean? - CGTN Europe

• The Case for Solarpunk - SolarpunkAlana

• Romania Hits 94% Recycling After Launching Largest Return Plan in the World - Good News Network

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The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

We’ve added a lot of subscribers since we first published our deep-dive on what solarpunk is back in 2022. That’s why we’re sharing a concise explanation of our scene in this post. It’s for all of you who’ve come more recently to this newsletter and as a refresher for those OGs who have been with us for a long time (love you guys).

What is solarpunk?

Solarpunk is a movement made up of stories, art and activism.

For something to be solarpunk in fiction or art it must be:

• Desirably sustainable - These are visions of the future we can get excited about living in, not nightmares to avoid.

• More socially just - Broadly speaking these are more equal, fair and inclusive worlds than the one we live in now.

• Inspire action - The greatest promise of solarpunk is its power to motivate more people to make these better futures a reality.

Is there just one type of solarpunk?

We argue that around the core definition above there are many different shades of solarpunk. When it comes to visual aesthetics the main ones are;

🏡 Cottage Solar (rural low tech)

🙆🏻‍♀️ Kawaii Solar (children’s anime style)

🌇 Metropolis Solar (shiny skyscrapers and flying cars)

🌱 Rooted Solar (based on real places and more believable)

Some artworks mix or blend these shades together like the famous Chobani advert.

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What types of solarpunk fiction are there?

A couple of extra shades we feel apply here. These are if tales are more thrilling or happy.

Happy or cozy solarpunk types of stories have low or no conflict, action or violence in them.

Thrilling solarpunk stories show deliciously sustainable worlds where conflict, violence and even murder still exist. These aspects of life tend to be much lower than in our current society.

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What about solarpunk activism?

There is a whole other part of our scene that is more about trying to start building a solarpunk world today. Things like community food growing, mission-led enterprises and renewable energy co-ops.

There are also groups like our friends The London School of Solarpunk, Solarpunks Club and to name just three.

We call all of this type of activity Now Solar or ‘solarpunking it’.

Why does any of this matter?

We believe solarpunk’s greatest potential is to inspire you with visions of futures that motivate you to make them a reality. We feel it’s the most important missing ingredient to help mobilise enough people to create the deliciously sustainable world that is possible if enough of us work together to make it so.

If you’d like to read more about the different shades of our scene, see more examples of them and also learn which things we think commonly get mislabelled as solarpunk, then check out our deep-dive blog here.

What’s your shade?

What are your favourite shades of solarpunk? Can you share examples of them?

Which shades would you like to see more of in fiction, movies and art?

Please let us know in the comments below.

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Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

Power Station is a feature-length documentary about how one London road came together to fund solar panels for all their rooftops. The film shows how self-described solarpunk couple, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, came together with their neighbours to make their street that much more deliciously sustainable.

The film is currently at the cinema in the UK. You can also request to show it where you are by contacting the Power Station team. You can see the trailer for Power Station here and check out the endorsement below by Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network.

“I can’t recommend this film enough. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll kickstart a community-led renewable energy revolution. I will say, without any sense of exaggeration or hyperbole, that this is one of the most important films ever made. Everyone needs to see it.” -

Solarpunk events coming up in London

Writing and fundraising

Our friends at The London School of Solarpunk (LSOS) have some cool-looking things happening in the new year. They’re taking place at their usual venue The Post Bar Tottenham.

Fundraising for grassroots groups

21/01/26 from 8pm

An introduction on how to get money for your community group or art project. Led by Alastair Ball who will give you tips and tricks on how to secure funds.

Collaborative writing session

04/02/26 from 8pm

Writing can often feel like a solitary activity so LSOS invites people to come and scribble together. Writers can either work on their own words or shared projects. Either way LSOS hopes this will help you bring more solarpunk tales to life.

Making green more inclusive

The Moja Collective is a group trying to encourage more diverse participation in nature. They are doing this by hosting walks and events in the British countryside targeted at people from global majority backgrounds.

They’re hosting an event 7th February 2026 called ‘Our Green Stories: Ancestral Roots, Solarpunk Futures’. You can register for it from 7th January on eventbrite. To learn more about The Moja Collective check out their Instagram here.

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Links

• Our Community Solarpunk Zine! -

• ‘Silkgrove’: An Indian Solarpunk Video Game That Places Restoration At The Centre Of Play - Homegrown

• Solar energy protects German vineyards from climate change - DW

• Separating oil and gas TV fact from fiction in ‘Landman’, with Debbie Gordon and Lucy Stone - Climate Curious Podcast

• Australians installed 100,000 home batteries in 17 weeks. Why can’t we all do that? - Just Have a Think

Two weeks off

I’m planning to keep screen-time to a minimum over the next fortnight. That means I’m unlikely to be picking up messages or comments during that time. I’ll aim to read and respond on the other side :)

Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

A future society where vibrant communities live immersed in nature while embracing the potential of technology. Sounds pretty solarpunk right?

Well this vision is brilliantly depicted in the awesome sci-fi series Moonhaven.

The show, first aired in 2022, was sadly cancelled after its first season. This wasn’t because it was unpopular.

Moonhaven was the number one, most-watched AMC+ exclusive series and most-watched new series in the streamer’s history behind Dark Winds. The reason why AMC reversed the renewal was due to their financial implosion at the time.

This super solarpunk TV series is going to start streaming again on Netflix from this 17th December. We’re asking you to do one of the easiest possible things you can to support solarpunk. Watch (and rewatch) this show and encourage others to do the same.

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If Netflix sees enough people are watching Moonhaven then there’s a chance they might commission more seasons. We’ve spoken to Peter Ocko, the showrunner behind the series, and he says he’d love to make more of it.

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We’re trying to get Moonhaven more seasons not only because it shows a deliciously sustainable possible future. It’s also because it’s a thrilling shade of solarpunk.

Similar to our SolarPunk Detective series, a murder mystery helps add drama to the exploration of this world.

The show also has brilliant acting and conceptual design, like the cool wooden ‘triquarter’ pictured above. The team behind Moonhaven obviously poured their heart and soul into making it.

Things you can do to support Moonhaven:

• Watch it on Netflix

• Rewatch it on Netflix! (The more streams it gets the better)

• Encourage others to watch it through social media, word of mouth, watch parties and any other way you can think of

The original series of Star Trek avoided early cancellation when enough people showed their support for it. We can do the same and help this solarpunk series live long and prosper.

Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

Seeds amidst the rubble

Our friends at The Practopia Project are releasing a series of stories with a protopian flavour to them. They follow the journey of failed screenwriter Johnny Darlin in the 2040s as he travels across the former United States. His mission is to report on communities which are helping restore people and the environment.

The Practopia Project’s mission is to inspire people to imagine better futures we could credibly achieve. The tomorrows they show are neither utopian or dystopian and so the future North America these tales are set in blend hopeful examples alongside very serious challenges.

Amidst the fall-out of the post-U.S.A, the narrator focuses on the communities and enterprises that might be the seeds for a deliciously sustainable future. Check it out on their Substack here and let us know if you think these tales are solarpunk or not.

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Links to other solarpunky stuff

• Solarpunk vs. Archeofuturism -

• Solarpunk: A Story of Sand and Energy: Imagining Namibia’s Bright Future - EU Delegation to Namibia

• Don’t sleep on the new solarpunk colony sim from devs behind Firewatch, Mini Motorways, Gone Home and more - PC Gamer [Game clip below and our interview with developers here]

  

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• How I made this Solarpunk 3D Environment - Zertox

• 10 reasons why we gotta keep trying - The Hopemakers

• How culture makes climate irresistible, with Daze Aghaji - Climate Curious Podcast

• Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity - Electrek

• Cardiff becomes first UK council to impose higher parking charges on larger vehicles - The Guardian

Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

This post we’re bringing you an in-depth chat with Paolo Pedercini the creator of upcoming solarpunk videogame ‘Future? No Thanks!’ (FNT)

What’s your background Paolo?

I’m an art professor with a background in media design. We’re talking prehistory here but before games I was making political cartoons for a local newspaper and a metalworkers union. I also played in an anarcho-punk band.

How did you get into making videogames?

Through activism, mostly. For a hot minute in the early ‘00s I acted as regional media director for the youth section of a left-wing party in Italy. I was making websites, flyers and zines. To promote a labour referendum I made my first explicitly political game. The project Molleindustria spun off from it.

What is FNT in a nutshell?

Future? No Thanks! is an open-world narrative game set in an eco-socialist quasi-utopia. Think Grand Theft Auto but instead of doing crimes you go around talking to people like in a point-and-click adventure game.

You play as an old grumpy man who is trying to get euthanized because he doesn’t fit in this world anymore. As part of the process he has to go through a sort of bucket list.

The quests are nostalgic and regressive things like driving a combustion engine car in a world that relies on public transportation and EVs. Another thing is eating a real steak when everybody has moved to a plant-based diet, bug protein and synthetic meat. These quests are basically a pretext to explore all these aspects.

What inspired you to make FNT?

Above everything it was videogames fixation with dystopias. Dystopian settings have been popular across media for a long time but in videogames they are generally employed in a shallow, uncritical way.

Dystopias are common in action and shooter games because they narratively justify worlds without moral and legal commitments where individuals have to fend for themselves and, you know, shoot a lot of things.

They narratively justify a scarcity of resources, which is the basis of many genres and gameplay patterns. There is even an increasing number of “cozy” dystopian games in which you build your little farm in the ruins of our civilization and such.

In doing so they make societal collapse exciting, if not outright fun and desirable, leaving out all the supposedly cautionary aspects of dystopian fiction.

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Do you think FNT is solarpunk?

Well, “Solarpunk Game” has been the working title from the beginning, so I always thought about it in relation to the genre. The dissatisfaction with pervasive dystopias seems to be the impetus for many solarpunks as well.

I haven’t used the term a lot when promoting the game because I don’t want to associate it too much with a genre that, on the surface, seems tied to a kind of bland wholesomeness, Pinterest fashion and anarcho-primitivist vibes. I know SolarPunk Stories has done a lot to deepen and develop the genre and movement but I’m talking in terms of broad mainstream perception.

I should say, Future? No Thanks! takes place in 2045, so the world doesn’t look too different from today. In SolarPunk Stories terms it’s “Rooted Solar”. Much of the urban landscape is still post-industrial midwest America, often slightly upgraded. The society is complex and not everybody is preoccupied with maintaining their co-op community garden.

The political economy portrayed in it has elements of “bright green” environmentalism, fully automated luxury communism, with a touch of degrowth. In my mind solarpunk is a cultural trend that is mainstream in this fictional world with some characters even dressing up in a solarpunky fashion. However it is one style that exists alongside other tendencies and subcultures.

Were you a fan of solarpunk before creating FNT?

Honestly, I don’t read a lot and I still haven’t found a solarpunk work I really liked, whether the label is embraced by the authors or applied retroactively. It seems to me that the genre is currently confined to being an ingredient in an art director’s mood board.

In the sense that Wakanda and Zootopia are solarpunk-flavored, Nausicaä or The Dispossessed have solarpunk vibes and so on. This might be a better destiny than cyberpunk, which has crystallized into a very narrow style. And it may be useful to not have canonical works that unambiguously establish solarpunk.

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Rather than a sci-fi genre it can be an open collaboratively created aesthetic that supports and prefigures a series of political programs. By contrast, I’m thinking about how leftist or anarchist propaganda is still coasting on soviet constructivism, mexican woodcuts print and punk iconography.

Modern fascists have found in generative AI their new aesthetic. It’s appropriately turgid, efficient, post-truth, and exploitative. It’s about time we update ours.

Why do you support eco-socialism?

I’ll try to be concise. In the 21st century there simply can’t be a form of socialism or communism that doesn’t take into account global warming and climate justice.

Conversely, we can’t address the climate crisis without massive infrastructural projects. Such projects can only be undertaken by states and intergovernmental organizations. All the market-driven solutions have failed spectacularly.

Capitalism cannot structurally account for long-term goals. It’s not even just about justice and equality. Capitalism, left unchecked as it is now, won’t survive itself.

And I would argue that this is a sentiment shared by a majority, at least in the Western world. The question is not what we need but how we get there.

How have the Green New Deal and Democratic Socialism simulators influenced the development of FNT?

The Green New Deal Simulator and the Democratic Socialism Simulator (DSS) are basically set in the present. I got some fair criticism that the DSS doesn’t actually simulate democratic socialism but rather a possible transition toward it starting from the institutional context of the United States in the 2020s.

To me that’s a much more interesting subject to explore but I can also see the need for more concrete depictions of daily life under a different political and economic system. So I had to change the perspective from a top-down management POV to a street-level view that was experiential and immersive.

What other movies, films, games etc have influenced the creation of FNT?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future, near-utopian novels like Ministry of the Future or New York 2140 have been an influence, especially his idea of “The best-case scenario you can still believe in.”

To me, if you turn the utopia dial too much, or move your setting too far into the future, it just becomes escapism. Escapism is okay but we aren’t short on that kind of entertainment.

FNT is a comedy game and the humor is a bit of a throwback to The Simpsons, Futurama and LucasArts adventure games. More generally, the game is chock-full of references to architecture, fashion, movies, literature and philosophy that have tried to imagine the future in the last century. On a meta level the game is also about utopianism.

Why a last-day framework? What does this allow you to explore that a more open time horizon wouldn’t?

The spatial scope of the game is significant for such a small-budget project. You get to move freely around this shrunk-down version of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I currently live.

The city is the real protagonist and the game is a kind of snapshot of it, taken on a random day. Adding a temporal dimension would make it somewhat impractical and open up all sorts of dilemmas about linearity and agency. And it might shift the focus to the life of the protagonist who is only a vehicle to explore this society.

Why is this coming out whenever GTA6 is? What’s the thinking behind that?

The videogame market is currently saturated with a lot of high-quality titles coming out all the time and often getting lost in the noise.

GTA6 is the biggest game in the works now. It’s long awaited and long delayed and all game studios are terrified to schedule their release against this blockbuster. I don’t have a release date and suspect my audience won’t rush to play GTA that day. FNT is a bit of a parody of GTA so I’m jokingly competing with it.

How to help promote and support ‘Future? No Thanks!’

Wishlisting the game on Steam and sharing things that promote it, like this interview.

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What are your thoughts?

What do you think of what Paolo has said above? Anything you especially agree or disagree with? Are you interested in playing this or one of his other games? Let us know in the comments below.

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Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

Our awesome friends at The London School of Solarpunk (LSOS) have got a few great-looking events coming up this winter.

We’ve written before about how vital we feel the role of organised labour is in ensuring a just transition to a solarpunk world. Now LSOS are holding Union Futures, two nights of talks, media and imaginative thinking about how solarpunks can work with and within the union movement to build a deliciously sustainable future together.

Ali Poncia, Policy Officer for Decarbonising Industry from The Trades Union Congress (TUC) will be teaming up with LSOS to lead talks, facilitate learning and help mobilise those want to get engaged with the labour movement.

Union Futures will take place Tuesday 11 Nov and 2 Dec, 7.30-9.30pm at The Post Bar in Tottenham.

As if all this wasn’t awesome enough, LSOS will be providing a vegan dinner. It will be made out of surplus food from a local veg shop for the super low price of £3.

If you’re interested in community organising, the future of work and creativity in social movements then register for Union Futures with LSOS free on Eventbrite here.

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LSOS are also hosting an event led by Noah Gabriel - How To Be A Better Cyborg. See what Noah has to say about that below;

It’s time to rise up against the machines that have taken over our minds and lives and made work a boring hell! Join the resistance at our secret rendez-vous spot. We will:

• Write slogans, chants, and songs to convince others that humans are still worth fighting for

• Experiment with comrade Donna Haraway’s proposal that we should embrace cyborg existence

• Share strategies and tactics for fighting back against our robot overlords

• 📍20:00–22:00 19th Nov at The Post Bar in Tottenham.

Links

• 99 Solarpunk Hobby Ideas - SolarpunkAlana

• Solarpunk Insider to the Residency [Cambodia] - Micro Galleries

• Hope Is Not Naive: How Solarpunk Is Winning the Clean Energy Revolution - SolarPunkPro Podcast

• Capital grains: the urban trees getting a second life - Positive News

• How Africa’s Great Green Wall is Solving an Ancient Conflict - Andrew Millison

Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

We’re marking Black History Month 2025 by celebrating some top black solarpunks.

Olalekan Jeyifous

Olalekan is Nigerian-born artist, designer and speculative architect based in New York. We’ve championed his imaginative visualisations of solarpunked future Brooklyn and Africa many times in the past.

His latest series depicts the “talented terranauts of the NY Institute of Aetherism & Alchemy, Geomantic Frontiering Dept. Where education intersects with deep exploration of the forest’s furthest thresholds.” You can see more about Olalekan’s work on his website and Instagram.

Simply Solarpunk

Claudia McClendon is an upcycled fashion designer who focuses on zero-waste design methods. In her own words, “everything I do within my art form is Simply Solarpunk AF! lol.”

She just finished production for her autumn collection of upcycled clothing for her brand 1Another: Solarpunk Fashion. The collection called RE:ndezvous will also promote the new Black woman-owned vintage store, House of Rebellion.

The clothing is available exclusively in-store now.

You can check out more of her work on her Instagram and donate to support what she does here.

Lavala at Solarpunk DC

Liberian-born Lavala is one of the founders of Solarpunk DC, a group championing their shade of solarpunk in the Washington metropolitan area. Formerly Head of Community at Climate DC, he and his key collaborator Shi have been promoting local food sovereignty, cycle power and more in the DMV.

They’ve recently held a great-looking artists talk on solarpunk at Big Planet Comics and lots of other events trying to help people start solarpunking the world right now. You can learn more about what they are up to through their Substack and Instagram.

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Atalanda Cameron

Former park ranger and passionate conservationist, Atalanda started the Solarpunking podcast series 3 months ago and is now on the 16th episode. You can listen to it here or on your pod platform of choice.

Elijah Claude

Atlanta-based Elijah loves to write long-reads on solarpunk and has guest posted for us more than once in the past. You can see some of his writing here and we’ll be sharing a select solarpunk post of his in an upcoming Substack.

Cameron Roberson

Cameron, who writes under the pen name Rob Cameron, is a teacher, linguist and writer. He’s also lead organizer for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers and founder of Constellations Mentorship for the Octavia Project. He’s written excellent thought pieces about our genre including In Search of Afro-Solarpunk for Reactor Magazine.

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Like our recent guest writer, Cameron has also made the case for there being more solarpunk noir fiction. According to Cameron’s blog he has penned his own protopian crime story ‘Ice Like Honey’. It is due to published by Lightspeed Magazine at some point in the near future.

Andrewism

Andrew Sage is based in Trinidad & Tobago and is one of the longest-standing and most prolific solarpunk content creators on YouTube. Check out his channel here and one of his solarpunk themed videos below.

Keisha Howard

Keisha is the Founder of Sugargamers, an organisation devoted to increasing diversity in gaming and tech. She did the first ever TED Talk on solarpunk which you can see below.

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Two weeks off

I’m planning to keep screen-time to a minimum over the next fortnight. That means I’m unlikely to be picking up messages or comments during that time. I’ll aim to read and respond on the other side :)

Help build solarpunk

[La Vie En Rose - Grace Jones from the - SolarPunk Stories Playlist]

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

>

Roleplaying games, space-based solarpunk and augmented reality aiming to get your growing things in this newsletter.

Grump your way through a solarpunk tomorrow

“Healthcare is free? In that case I’ll take 10 euthanasias!” is a line from the brilliant-looking solarpunk comedy game Future? No Thanks!. In this game you play a cranky grandpa of the 2040s who moans about all the protopian progress that’s been made.

The project comes from indie games developer Molleindustria and follows on from their Democratic Socialism and Green New Deal Simulators which are also available on Steam.

We’re planning to release an interview with the game’s creator for our paid subscribers in the coming weeks. In the meantime check out the trailer below and wishlist the game on Steam to help boost its visibility for other gamers.

Starship solarpunk gets closer to launch

Space-based solarpunk RPG meets city-building game Generation Exile has released a demo you can now play for free.

Last year we did an in-depth interview one of the game’s developers that you can read here. You can play the demo here and watch a recent trailer for the game below.

Where gaming meets solarpunking

This episode of the Climate Curios podcast looks at several different creative approaches to gamifying action for a more a deliciously sustainable world.

Pokemon Go for guerrilla gardening

The game Glitch is by our friends Nowadays on Earth, the guerrilla gardening and urban greening activist group led by self-confessed solarpunk Kalpana Arias. They’ve partnered with the conservation charity The National Trust to develop an AR game called Glitch that’s been described as being ‘like Pokemon Go for plants and green spaces’.

Using your phone camera you can simulate how spaces might look with more trees and plants in them. Each virtual tree shows where people want more nature. Players can also see where others want things planted.

Nowadays is working with with local institutions to get real plants put in where the digital visualisations have been created. Glitch also directs players to educational resources and tools on how to do more hands-on urban greening themselves.

The aim of the game is to get more people into real life tree-planting and guerrilla gardening who otherwise might not have.

One other aspect to the game that is important to Kalpana is about decentralising tech tools like these so they’re more in the hands of people. She says;

All the data stays with us, nothing is shared or sold and the AI we have used in the beta is minimal, trained only on our own data.

The machine learning we use is to help build a self-governing mapping system for communities and support on the garden designs.

We didn’t work with large corporations to build Glitch, only grassroots partners and the National Trust. Our long-term goal is to open source the technology once the foundation is strong enough so that communities everywhere can adapt and use it.

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Local politician for the planet RPG

Another game mentioned in the podcast is Climate Crisis: Bridgewater Heath by Lex Fefegh. This is a short browser-based roleplaying game where, “players balance climate action with political survival as a local councillor”. It has been made in collaboration with the non-profit Impact on Urban Health. Lex is looking for feedback on this beta version of the game which you can play here for free.

App to help you stop shopping and start styling

Whering is an app that wants to stop you buying new clothes by helping you make more of the garments you already have. According to their founder Bianca Rangecroft, Whering does this by digitising what you’ve got in the wardrobe so its easier for you to style yourself. It also means others in the 7 million-strong Whering community can help style you as well if you want them to.

What Whering has done is bring into reality Cher Horowitz’s computer styling program from the 90s film Clueless. This idea was the number one thing wanted to see in her solarpunk world so we imagine she must be thrilled.

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According to the Rhobalists blog, Whering also offers other features to help promote a greener fashion lifestyle. These include connecting users to repair, alteration, sustainable laundry and donation services through the app.

To find out more about all of the above check the 11 minute podcast here.

Welcome to the terrafoil

Does piloting a sail-powered mechanical spider land-ship through fields of wind turbines sound solarpunk to you? It does to Deep Sky Games, a worker-owned cooperative game studio based in Berlin.

They focus on games set in “aspirational and hopeful human futures”. Through a series of short videos they have been charting their development of a game where you pilot a ‘terrafoil’, the previously mentioned wind-driven land craft. Check out their Linktree for more.

What do you think?

• Have you played any of these games? Were they hits or misses?

• Which would you most like to play that you haven’t done yet?

• What other videogames do you think are solarpunk?

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And to play us out…

From the SolarPunk Stories Playlist (and the score of the classic videogame ICO), Pentagon - Heal

Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

This is a guest post by Cromlyn

“Solarpunk noir?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Aren’t noir texts about hopelessly dark and nihilistic worlds?” This is exactly what Alex asked when I pitched him this piece. Imagine a smoke-stained courtroom as a battered and creased lawyer starts to speak…

As SolarPunk Stories has already explored, there are many shades of solarpunk. So many, I added a couple of my own to their framework. From Thrilling to Happy, Fantastical to Rooted, solarpunk is a broad concept, with space inside it for stories ranging from farming romances to survival tales, kitchen-sink dramas to action adventure.

One type of setting that reoccurs across a few short stories and tabletop games is detective fiction. This makes a lot of sense, it has a clear narrative and believable stakes within a generally utopian or protopian society. It implicitly looks at what people in that society value and find unacceptable. No wonder ‘DI Russo - SolarPunk Detective’ is the first thrilling tale from a better future to be published by SolarPunk Stories.

But can solarpunk detective fiction be noir? Here we get into competing definitions. Otto Penzler argues that though classic hard-boiled private detectives, such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s, Philip Marlowe may bend or break the law, this is done by a protagonist with meaningful agency in pursuit of justice.

Noir works, on the other hand,

“whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists who are seriously flawed and morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak and nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy and alienation lead them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry” ^[3]

I interpret noir differently. To me, it doesn’t mean the worlds of these stories are irredeemably broken, because that wouldn’t align with solarpunk. I believe its defining feature is a feeling of guilt by the protagonist.

In making my case, I’ll sketch the history of various varieties of noir, while also describing recent examples of those varieties. I’ll explore examples of solarpunk detective stories and I’ll finish with discussing a few ways we might see noir in future solarpunk fiction.

A history of noir

The term Film Noir dates back to 1946, and was used to describe the 1940-1950s film adaptations from hardboiled and noir detective fiction that came before it. That fiction, of anti-hero gumshoes navigating organised crime and often corrupted systems, in turn comes out of the American experience with prohibition in the 1920s and the return of traumatised veterans from the Great War.

These are stories of black depression, grey morals and red violence. The modern UK series set in the same period, Peaky Blinders, makes the shellshock and guilt of the returned men explicit, from the first episode onwards. For me part of the darkness these writers are expressing is a form of survivor’s guilt for having made it through the horrors of the war, even if these men wouldn’t have articulated it that way themselves.

In Boardwalk Empire, the same theme is personified in the tragic figure of Richard Harrow. The traumatised veterans become brutal criminals in an increasingly harsh society. The softness of Art Nouveau fades away, fascism rises and the fiction that made sense in the 1920s is returned to in film form as the Second World War ends and the genre cycle repeats.

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The aftermath of the Second World War left a mixed impact culturally. The League of Nations had failed, the unfolding stories of institutional madness led to questions about human nature and exposure abroad was challenging racist institutions back in America.

This was worked through in popular culture by heroic war films on one hand and cynical, fatalistic Film Noir cinema on the other. Did people feel guilty at having failed to make the First World War the ‘war to end all wars’?

Neo-noir film comes in the 1970s at the same time that the Vietnam War was returning brutalised soldiers to society. This is the classic period of Chinatown. The plot centers on corruption as mega-companies exploit water control to force small farmers off the land. The same fatalism and distrust in institutions meets new Cold War suspicions.

Also in the 70s, we have the hippies and peace campaigns leading to the start of the modern environmental movement. Others have already traced the influence of art-nouveau on the aesthetics of this period. The fears of global nuclear devastation led to the first wave of climate-fiction, from the well-known, to hidden gems that shaped my childhood.

We also see the rising fear of pollution, with Nixon creating the EPA in 1970, while the evening news and returning soldiers tell of burning forests and people. A new wave of films were made as people worked through that shame and sense that corporate America was destroying the environment and the immobilizing guilt about living in Omelas (1973). Immobilizing guilt you say? “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”.

Cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s from the same dark roots. The film which did more than any other to instigate that genre is Blade Runner. It drew heavily on noirish themes with its brooding, disillusioned detective cruising from one bruising encounter after another in a grubby world full of hi-tech low lives.

Stepping forward, America’s post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t seem to have generated a new wave of noir. IMDB lists 95 ‘Twenty First Century Noir’ films but new themes seem to be about amnesia and loss of identity, not the environment. Perhaps as reality has become cyberpunk, cyberpunk themes are leaking into mainstream art? Or it is just the long shadow of Blade Runner (and its 1968 noir book origin)? Answers on a postcard.

Solarpunk is a reaction to a cyberpunk world, to the bland commodification of the 2010s and to immobilizing despair. Noir fiction is, I argue, a reaction to guilt and according to Duggan, to despair. The potential synergy is clear, but can I back it up with evidence? Spoilers will follow.

Solarpunk detectives

The very first tale in the very first overtly solarpunk anthology is a detective story. Soylent Green is People by Carlos Oris, follows a private detective in a future Brazil trying to establish the time of death of two victims. He faces antipathy from a corrupt technophobic church, bio-weapon armed thugs and a fatal love triangle.

It was released by Brazilian publisher Draco Editora as part of their groundbreaking 2012 solarpunk anthology with the english translation coming out in 2018. Solarpunk environmentalism is the backdrop and stage setting but not the motive.

Biofuel wealth is old news in Brazil, but using it to render down a body for fuel consumption, in an attempt to absolve yourself of guilt? It’s a set of tropes older than Sweeney Todd. For me the theme reads also as an allegory for guilt over letting other generations take the brunt of climate change while we live high on the hog.

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Another story in the same volume, When Kingdom’s Collide by Telmo Marçal, is written in pure hard-boiled detective fiction prose. It follows an ill-fated undercover agent up against a (different) corrupt church whose members have undergone radical surgery to survive off photosynthesis alone.

The analogy is directly that of Portugal’s religious space, with supposedly ascetic church leaders bleeding their followers of wealth. His lover, a believer in the church, is killed and it’s covered up by state corruption. In the end, he’s told to leave it, and over two pages and as many days, transmutes his survivor’s guilt ‘in my belly, I felt the full weight of fasting and failure’, into murderous rage, ‘I’m a man. I have them in my target. I will have my vengeance’.

Grover: Case #C09 920 "the most dangerous blend" by Edward Edmonds, appears in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018). Like the DI Russo - SolarPunk Detective story, it’s more of a police procedural than a true noir. Nonetheless I feel both the motive (getting more limited coffee rations in this climate-impacted future) and the setting (a weather manipulation station) are tied into a sense of authorial guilt over destruction of natural resources. The characters do not say it ‘to camera’ but the author chose the motivating situation as something they feel is emotionally charged enough that murder becomes possible.

And then of course there is The Prodigal, the first in a planned series of SolarPunk Detective tales by SolarPunk Stories. As already mentioned this is more of a hard-boiled police story than a noir text. At the end Detective Inspector Russo does seem to express guilt about not having understood the clues more clearly earlier. Is this just personal remorse or an expression of something larger?

Ideas for future protopian detective fiction

So projecting forward what guilt and themes might we see in future solarpunk detective stories? One is the tension inherent in cities. As a significant density of people, a city will be drawing on larger areas to sustain itself.

It protects itself from the changing climate by intensive infrastructure but not those surrounding areas, perhaps even making it worse by still demanding resources (like the water shortage plot of Chinatown). How does an empathetic city dweller feel about that? Do they try to protect their neighbours? What from?

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Another fertile theme is dirtiness. Dirty ecologies and dirty psychologies, to be exact. There are parallels to be drawn with suppressed memories and buried waste. That and exploring restoring degraded ecosystems and combating invasive species while also restoring a degraded sense of self and fighting off invasive thoughts.

This lightly connects back to the early 21st century noir preoccupations with identity and memory. It also makes sense as a way to introduce conflict into a protopian world. Bad memories and a conflict between what we have done and who we are now.

A classic source of guilt in stories is the idea of the sins of the father. Years ago, I attended a deathbed of someone wracked with guilt by the idea that his dad, a slaughterhouse inspector, may have been signing off on TB-infected beef. I’ve read one solarpunk anthology story where a middle-aged son is going over the climate tax death dues for his father’s lifestyle. The story didn’t match my version of noir at all. It explored the theme of coming to terms rather than guilt, but the premise could be the seed of a more noirish solaprunk tale.

Finally, some solarpunk writers might engage with hard, sociological science fiction. What is accepted by society now that might be a future source of guilt? The (cyberpunk) Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick (2020) has ‘Fartburger’ as an insult for reactionary meat-eaters.

The cli-fi tale A Full Life by Paolo Bacigalupi describes a North American child climate refugee listening to their aunt’s stories of flying to Ibiza and ‘hating her just a little’. What secrets lurk in people’s past? What does it say about the story setting if behaviours have changed that much?

In conclusion, we have looked at my interpretation of noir in context down the years as well as existing solarpunk short stories that are circling noir themes. We’ve also pulled on those threads to imagine stories that might take that further.

The creative tension between sunnier futures and grim, even noirish pasts looks fruitful. It’s clearly only a tiny subset of the stories to be told in the solarpunk genre but might be one worth chasing down, through the dark rain and the faint scent of perfume lingering in the night.

What do you think?

• Do you think solarpunk can be noir?

• Do you agree with Cromyln’s interpretation of the genre?

• What do you think the difference is between noir and hard-boiled detective stories?

• Have you read any of the stories he mentions? What do you think of his analysis of them?

• Would you like to see more solarpunk fiction with darker themes in them?

• Let us know in the comments below.

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Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

[Turquoise turbines for the win IMAGE: Spikings Art]

A collection of solarpunky stuff we’ve come across in the past few weeks;

• Free Creative Writing Workshop Hosted by The London School of Solarpunk 2nd September ‘25

• tf is Solarpunk? -

• Solarpunk, Grokkists, Climate Fiction, and Community-Led Sustainability: A podcast with - Shifting Views

• What is the Solarpunk Summit? - Solarpunk Summit

• A climate heist novel with hope? Welcome to solarpunk fiction. 🌎🔐 - SpeakUpForBlueTV

• How to shoot sustainable sci-fi, with Dr. Itandehui Jansen - Climate Curious

• How SOLAR PARKS are fixing up abandoned COAL MINES. - Just Have a Think

• David Bowie - Heroes - SolarPunk Stories Playlist

  Help build solarpunk

  The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

  Share SolarPunk Stories

  See you in the sunshine,

  Alex Holland

  Founder, SolarPunk Stories

  For fortnightly updates on solarpunk style art, activism and more subscribe below

“This solarpunk idea is all well and good but Elon Musk is where it’s at. That man owns the future, he’s taking us to Mars”. These were the words of a woman I was on a date with a few years ago.

Before you denounce this past potential paramour for her love of Musk I need to clarify something. This was before Elon had gone full ‘dark gothic MAGA’, taken a chainsaw to public services, championed the far-right across the world and all the rest.

What impressed her was Musk’s vision. She’d never even heard of solarpunk, but Elon’s world of sexy electric vehicles, robot butlers and space colonies sounded exciting and like progress. What she did not appear to be aware of is how many of his visions were drawn not just from science fiction but often very old science fiction.

This and other aspects of the Tesla founder’s relationship with sci-fi are explored in the brilliant recent BBC podcast series by Jill Lepore called ‘X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story’.

Lepore says Musk’s relationship with sci-fi is important because it’s an inextricable part of a new kind of capitalism;

“Let’s call it Muskism, an extravagant, extreme capitalism. Extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices can be driven by dreams and fantasies that come from science fiction.”

Lepore argues that Muskism is not limited to the Tesla Founder but has become common among some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. By looking at how sci-fi has influenced Muskism she says we can see the stories that underpin the thinking of Jeff Bezos and many other tech titans too.

Each episode in the eight part series takes a different theme. In ‘Iron Man’ Lepore argues that people calling Musk the “real-word Tony Stark” helped transform his public persona.

She plays clips from his earlier career where he spoke much more modestly about wanting to help shift the world to clean energy. After enough time being compared to the Marvel superhero he has transformed into the more swaggering billionaire who feels he can do no wrong.

As Lepore analyses Elon and his relationship to science fiction she seeks to give him the benefit of the doubt where possible. She also highlights some of the positive influences he has had on the world of technology, not least in renewable energy. This makes her analysis that he has absorbed many old sci-fi tropes in a counter-productive way, all the more effective.

The episode themed around The Terminator is one example. Musk has publicly said the warning the film makes about artificial general intelligence potentially trying to wipe out humanity is very real.

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Not a fan of government regulation, Musk has called for it in this area. But as Lepore points out the companies today that most closely resemble those that created the Terminator, the fictional Cyberdyne Systems, look a lot like Musk’s efforts in robotics and AI.

In ‘Planet B’ Lepore points out how Elon’s desire to colonise Mars was directly influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. So much so, he had Asimov’s books stored in the same SpaceX rocket that launched his Tesla Roadster into orbit.

These books are set in a far future where the mathematician Hari Seldon has developed the field of ‘psychohistory’ where he can use maths to predict future events. Using this framework he sees that the galactic empire is about to collapse and usher in a 30,000 year long dark age of barbarity and suffering.

Seldon acts to establish two Foundations of knowledge set up by mathematicians, scientists and engineers on remote planets. Their goal is to help shorten the coming dark age to 1000 years.

Musk sees Mars colonisation not only as a foundation for human knowledge but as a sort of ark for humanity to carry on if all life on earth is wiped out.

Lepore interviews sci-fi author and theoretical physicist Vandana Singh who, like Musk, was a childhood fan of The Foundation Series. But when she came back to reread the books as an adult she became…

“…utterly horrified that I had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The other thing I noticed is the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with the techno-fetishism.

We have the planet Trantor, which is an entire city and that's just so dumb. Because how can you have oxygen and climate and so forth if you have a planet that is completely urbanized. That makes no sense.”

The hard sci-fi writer (and author of two of the first solarpunk novels) Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a series of books about terraforming Mars to make it habitable for people. He is quoted in the podcasts as saying,

“I still speak positively about us going to Mars and even perhaps someday terraforming Mars, but it's a project for like the year three thousand AD. What I feel I have to say now is to remind people there is no Planet B. It's not simple, it's not fast, it isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so we can't be thinking that Earth is disposable.”

Another critique Singh has of The Foundation series is that it lacks decent female characters. This may be partly because it was written in the 1950s. How long ago the texts that inspire Muskists are from is a point Lepore emphasises;

“…the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos cite, the science fiction they read as boys drops off right before science fiction was reinvented by women and writers of colour. Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang. To me as a historian, Musk and Bezos's vision of the future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique. It's ancient.”

Lepore talks with Singh about why she thinks these Silicon Valley tech titans are so attached to stories written in the 1950s and even earlier. Singh says it’s because they suffer from ‘paradigm blindness’ which Lepore describes as, “a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability to imagine that other people just don't subscribe to its view of the world.” Singh says she thinks stories can cure that blindness. We’d argue solarpunk ones would have the best shot of doing so.

There’s one thing that my date from the past was right about. Musk’s vision has been trumpeted everywhere. Even though in many ways it’s much more backward-looking than people might think, it can seem fresh and exciting. This is because it’s posed as a positive alternative to the doomerism we’ve been drowning in for the past several decades.

We need to get our solarpunk message out there more effectively. One that is not about techno-fetishist fever dreams but instead offers visions of deliciously sustainable futures that can entertain as well as inspire people to action. If we don’t do a better job of making our stories more popular then, in spite of all its faults, Muskism could still end up owning the future.

What are your thoughts? How much do you feel past science fiction has influenced how people see the future today? Have you listened to LePore’s podcast series? What did you think about it? Do you think I should have gone on a second date with that Musk-admiring woman? Let us know in the comments below.

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Help build solarpunk

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories

Previously we’ve looked at how people are solarpunking trams, buses and even airships. This week we’re on to trains and metro systems.

Power from the train tracks? Switzerland’s giving it a go

Swiss startup Sun-Ways is testing removable solar panels that fit between railway tracks. A special train rolls out the panels like a solar carpet, making installation quick and maintenance simple.

According to Positive News, the pilot site uses 48 panels expected to generate around 16 kWh per year. If scaled across all 5,300 km of Swiss rail, it could supply about 2% of the country’s current electricity demands. The panels are anti-reflective, self-cleaning and equipped with sensors to monitor performance and safety.

There are still concerns about things like glare, vibrations and fire risks but the three-year trial will monitor it all closely. Interest is already coming in from countries around the world.

Smart reuse of space and clean energy generation feel solarpunk to us. What do you think?

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Barcelona’s subways are now charging more than just customers

The Catalan capital’s metro is doing something pretty cool. As this Matt Ferrell video explains, they’re capturing energy from braking trains and using it to power stations and nearby electric vehicle chargers.

This ‘regenerative braking’ is similar to that used in cars. By drawing on this power Barcelona is cutting electricity use, cooling the tunnels and contributing towards their climate goals. You can find out more in the video below.

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Links

• SOLARPUNK ART 2025 REVEAL STREAM - Andrewism

• Biodesign Symposium 2025 - Growing Biodesigners through Worldbuilding in Engineering Education - Solarpunk Manifesto

• Create A Sustainable Solarpunk Future In Darrington Press’s Solar Gardens - The Fandomentals

• We Deserve Better [New podcast series] - Solarpunking

• Beyond The Book: NEVADA [solarpunk thriller] - Novel Nexus

• Futuristic Greenhouse 🌞 🌱 SOLARPUNK ASMR - Dreamscape ASMR

• How to Fall in Love with the Future: Excerpt - Resilience

• Why Bhutan is Building the Anti-Dubai - The B1M

• Chattanooga bounces back from polluted past to become North America's first National Park City - Advnture

• Global media giants unite to dispel the myth of climate indifference - Positive News

Two weeks off

I’m planning to keep screen-time to a minimum over the next two weeks. That means I won’t be picking up any messages or comments during that time. I’ll aim to read and respond on the other side :)

Get solarpunk rolling

The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Help bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.

Share SolarPunk Stories

See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories