This is a conversation with speculative fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson. This is episode 94 of The Fire These Times podcast.

His stories have appeared in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, Little Blue Marble, The New Accelerator, StarShipSofa, and more, as well as various books and anthologies. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and longlisted for the BSFA. In 2016 his story “Sunshine State” won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest, and in 2017 he was runner up in the Kaleidoscope “Writing the Future” Contest. His 2015 essay “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk” has helped define and grow the solarpunk subgenre. He is a member of the cursed 2020 class of the Clarion Workshop.

Check out his website and newsletter.

We primarily spoke about an essay he wrote in 2015 called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk“.

Topics Discussed:

• What is solarpunk?
• Introduction to his essay “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk“
• The urgency of solarpunk and the response to cyberpunk
• Post-normal fiction
• Solarpunk and global network society: why did it start in the 2010s?
• The importance of care work
• Solarpunk and the future of cities
• Solarpunk and utopias
• Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction
• The climate activism momentum
• How has solarpunk changed over the years? Also: discussion of COP26 and the Green New Deal

Books mentioned + Recommended:

• Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures edited by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Taiyo Fujii and Shweta Taneja (which includes a story by Andrew)
• Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures by Andrew (Pre-order now)
• Lo stato solare by Andrew
• Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older
• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
• Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

The art is by artist and illustrator CosmosKitty (I added the text). Check out their work here: cosmoskitty.com

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

We might need some punks to go out and do some direct action, make it harder to run this particular stack of infrastructure, and make it a lot less profitable to extract and burn fossil fuels, with a variety of tactics. It’s not a great situation; it would be better for all of us if we could smoothly pass the correct policies. But in the absence of that, we need a countercultural force to help get us on a better track.

Andrew Dana Hudson: My name is Andrew Dana Hudson, I use he/him pronouns, and I am a speculative fiction writer (sometimes I call myself a climate fiction writer); I do research into sustainability, and do narrative strategy and editing. Happy to be here.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thanks for being here. We’ll primarily be speaking about one of the essays you wrote a few years ago called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk.” Can you explain what solarpunk is? How would you define solarpunk?

AH: I call it a speculative movement, because it seems to be broader than just a speculative genre of fiction. There are people who see these aesthetics and genre conventions and are more interested in praxis than they are in being creatives in this particular space. 

As a movement of science fiction and praxis, it seems to be about trying to tell stories in a future in which there’s been some kind of green revolution, or there’s going to be. It’s about figuring out what a sustainable world actually looks like and how we get there from here.

I often talk about it in comparison to cyberpunk, the original -punk subgenre. Solarpunk is the true heir to cyberpunk. When cyberpunk emerged in the eighties, it was at a time when science fiction was a lot of time travel paradoxes, wormholes, and galactic space empires—all really cool ideas, but some writers came onto the scene who said, Look, all that stuff out in space is missing what is changing life right here on planet Earth, which is computation. 

That was the technological revolution at the time, so they created a canon of literature and an aesthetic based on imagining computation spinning out to be a more dominant force in the world—which of course it now is. They nailed a lot of those basic predictive elements. They called it cyber-“punk” because they mostly told these stories from a countercultural perspective, from the perspective of people who were fighting the system or marginalized by the system in a more elaborate way than the average cyber-prole, who were rebellious in some manner and not living a mainstream life where you wake up in your tiny apartment and fill your cyber-briefcase and go to your cyber-job at Weyland-Yutani Industries or whatever, and go home and eat your cyber-meal. Cyberpunks are the hackers, the mercenaries, the cool people. 

Where solarpunk comes into the equation is looking at our current situation and being like, Okay, there’s a new set of technologies that are changing the world: technologies of sustainability. There is really cheap renewable power, which keeps getting cheaper and cheaper—solar in particular. Solar has this distributed potential to change where and how our society moves power around. Then there’s permaculture; there’s technologies of adaptation to the changing climate; there’s a little biotech in there. There’s all kinds of traditional knowledge that is being rediscovered and found useful.

The question is, Okay, who are the punks in this situation? Who are the people who are taking these technologies to a bleeding-edge place and, in the context of this technological upheaval, are living countercultural, not mainstream, lives? What are their stories?In that context it’s not hard to see how we get to the typical solarpunk optimism, because the normal majoritarian position on a lot of questions of the future is: We’re doomed, the system can’t be changed, and all we can do is live increasingly sad and nihilistic lives, increasingly distracted by the digital figments being fed to us.

Solarpunk pushes in an opposite direction. Cyberpunk was about technologies that abstract human relationships with the world, that drive our lives into greater and greater levels of abstraction. Solarpunk is about technologies that de-abstract human relationships with the material world, that give us more agency over food and water, over the climate, over the land. 

It also brings in a whole host of people who are seeing solarpunk as an opportunity to tell stories about social justice which is sorely needed, to tell stories that are more diverse and bring in perspectives from around the globe, from different marginalized identities, from Afro-futurism and Indigenous futurism, and disability futures and queer futures—those all seeing solarpunk aesthetics and wanting to play is great.

EA: How did you go from looking at solarpunk as an aesthetic to assessing its political economy? And what does that look like?

AH: When I wrote that essay, solarpunk was just beginning to peek into the consciousness. “Assessing” is a tricky word, because there wasn’t a lot to assess; there wasn’t a lot of solarpunk literature. There was a little art; there were a few stories; there were fashion sketches on Tumblr that, when paired with trees and skyscrapers, seemed to imply a vibe. And there was some manifesto-ing going on. There’s been constant manifesto-ing for the last seven years.

I read “Notes Toward a Manifesto,” an essay by Adam Flynn, who was someone I had been acquainted with in the Bay Area. I made him get a beer with me, and we started talking about solarpunk, and wrote some solarpunk later. But for me, having those conversations and getting a sense of what kinds of futures people were starting to play with, I wanted to offer some sense of grounding. [My] essay is really advice to kids on Tumblr who are slightly younger than me—the idea that I was an “elder” know-it-all six years ago feels very funny, but I was trying to say, This implies a certain set of political arrangements. 

There are not a lot of magical technologies in these imageries—people still have headphones in, they still have phones, there aren’t a lot of flying cars in solarpunk art (though there are some). Maybe what this is suggesting is not that we invent a bunch of new never-heard-of technologies, discover new scientific principles, and this creates a rippling change to our society and this is what this new society looks like if we invent those things, but rather it implies that we change our political relationships to each other, to technologies, to how we build our cities, what kind of labor we pay for (all those green skyscrapers need a lot of gardeners hired as supers to keep those trees alive), and how we treat each other.

I wanted to talk about a here-or-there of getting to those sustainable political relationships, and ask what sort of ground we’re building on when we pursue a solarpunk future. I don’t think solarpunk has to be a hundred percent engaged with what we do in the 2020s, what we do in the 2030s—it can go further out.  But that, for me, was the most interesting part of the question, so I wanted to riff on that.

EA: That makes sense. Is it fair to say that what separates solarpunk as a genre, aesthetic, or a speculative movement, is a sense of a present urgency? Most of these stories are set in the future, but they are responding to a real need in the present.

AH: Yeah. We live in very impending times. The climate crisis is here; we’re in the cyberpunk dystopia; but the problem is that it turns out it doesn’t even work very well, handing power over to the big-tech digital mega-corporations. They’re not actually able to solve the problems that are going to afflict even them in the future. That implies an urgency that we all naturally feel.

The other thing is, all science fiction and speculative fiction is really written about the time it’s written in. It’s not about the future; the great stuff is about the politics and the culture and the vibe of the present. Our vibe at the present is: Time is running out. So that’s going to make it into both the stories we tell and also how we interpret these stories and vibes. It’s precarious, but also really exciting. 

There’s a term I use in a book I have coming out next year, Our Shared Storm, which is my first novel-like book, it’s kind of a “fix-up” novel. There’s an extended section on climate fiction and how I think it works, and the term I use is “post-normal fiction.” In sustainability there’s a term called “post-normal science” that has been very influential on the discipline. The idea is, imagine a chart space with an X and Y axis: the X axis is uncertainty, and the Y axis is stakes, and as you get further out, you move out of the realm of pure science, where you’re doing abstract research, into a world of applied science, and then out into a world of advocacy and consultancy where policymakers call upon scientists to give their opinions, and those opinions affect the real world, have real stakes, and are trying to answer questions about problems that are not as clear as those in a laboratory.

Then if you go out even further, you get into what [Jerome] Ravetz and [Silvio] Funtowitz called the “post-normal” realm, which is an area where the stakes are high, or uncertainty is high, or both. You’re dealing with problems where you only get one shot. But their argument is: You can still do science in this situation. We can look at similar graphs; this is something that authors and all kinds of different disciplines could be doing. Look at climate fiction: because it is speaking to a particular political moment about something that is very impending and uncertain, and the stakes are very high, what we’re doing is a kind of “post-normal” fiction.

Then people think of it very differently—they stop feeling like, I want to create a piece of pure literature, and start being like, How can I use my stories (or whatever my creative talent is) to nudge the world in a better direction? Because I’ve got to do something! There’s an activist bent to a lot of this. It can be a little didactic, it can be a little prefigurative. People are using solarpunk and other kinds of speculative fiction to game out problems and figure out how to solve them—as opposed to just saying, Here’s where I imagine it going, or, Here’s what the future is going to be like.

If you want to purely predict the future, I don’t know if solarpunk is the best place to start. It’s an unlikely proposition; a lot has to go right for us, we have to win a lot of coinflips. But solarpunk says, Let’s figure out what it looks like if we make good choices. Let’s tell stories about that situation and hopefully in the process figure out what those good choices are, and mobilize our collective imaginations to get on that bandwagon together.

EA: You mention in the essay a possible limitation to solarpunk; it can’t do everything. 

The essay was written in 2015, and you wrote that solarpunk is a “creature wholly of this decade, native to global networked society.” I read it for the first time a few months ago, but there’s something about solarpunk that feels, even today, very 2010s—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t also feel 2020s. But enough time had already passed for the internet to be no longer that much of a “new” big deal for many people. I’m among those who feel “native” to the internet, whatever that means, in the first generation to say so, as a Millennial (and certainly true for those younger than me). 

Why do you think the 2010s was the decade where solarpunk really started becoming a thing?

AH: There are pure technological reasons. That was the historical moment where we started to see the cost of solar power and other renewables plunge and begin to out-compete fossil fuels. From a This is what we’re doing in the new technological revolution! standpoint—like [William] Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things” (that’s a classic cyberpunk saying). When the new thing is renewable energy technology that’s shaking up power structures that flow from our energy system, then we have to figure out what the street is doing with those things. That takes us to a different place than cyberpunk; it calls for a new moment. 

When I wrote this—I look back at this essay and how influential it’s turned out to be, and I feel chagrined, because I one-hundred-percent missed what was around the corner. I wrote this for a moment in which it felt like we were locked into neoliberal stagnation, and the only bright spot that I saw was the budding, on the margins, of a new kind of imaginary in solarpunk. Then a year later we have Brexit, we have Trump, and all of the sudden my sense that the ruling class had poured molasses all over the levers of change totally went out the window. It became very clear that rather than the neoliberal establishment firmly having their hands on the steering wheel and controlling where society goes, no one had their hands on the steering wheel, and everyone was just slumped down shoving their foot into the gas pedal.

In that situation, it turns out to be slightly different. The levers of change are up for grabs, and we can imagine a politics that radically shifts the direction of our world, of our societies, and that doesn’t need to be a prefigurative lifestyle in the margins of these technologies; we can imagine it coming from a revival of the trade union movement, from mass-use movements, from mass politics, and not from a counterculture. 

But at the time, in 2015, when we were really feeling the drag of the Obama years here in the States—we weren’t at the “End of History,” but if we were going to have new history happen then we needed to very deliberately crack that shell open. And it seemed like this imagination, and these people and practices that I and others were identifying as a new generation of science fiction and real-life punkdom, was the place for it.

And just mechanically, it emerged from people on Tumblr, who are very genre-savvy, seeing a lacuna and wanting to fill in what goes in that genre-spot. It didn’t emerge from a bunch of sci-fi writers deciding to write some edgy stuff and then that stuff getting collected and called “solarpunk.” Solarpunk as a term inspired a lot of people to write particular kinds of stories.

That shift from We want to talk about genre; we’re tech- and media-savvy teens on Tumblr to established science fiction writers being inspired by these ideas and aesthetics—that’s a flip-flop that is very contemporary, is very much Of internet culture in the [twenty-]teens. Good science fiction is always about the politics of the moment, and our politics in the teens, and what we felt impending, required a new kind of storytelling to deal with it.

Cyberpunk was about urban decay and corporate power and globalization; those are the core anxieties underlying it. With solarpunk, it’s global social justice, the failures of late capitalism, and the climate crisis. And those primary concerns have shifted a lot since 2015; now I think a lot of people would say that it’s even more the climate crisis, and it’s the rise of fascism amidst the failures of late capitalism, and it’s global social justice taking a back seat to the way inequality is playing out through the lens of the pandemic.

Solarpunk stories—none of us were out there predicting something like COVID. If we were reinventing solarpunk now, in 2022, we’d come up with something very different, because the ground has shifted. All these things are very historically contingent, but that’s what makes them easy and interesting and open for lots of people to engage with, because we’re all living in that history and we all have opinions about it.

EA: You mentioned the focus of global justice. One of the elements of your essay that grabbed my attention is that you mention the importance of care work, that while it has always been important and still is, it is going to be even more important in the future. Walk us through you thinking of why it was important to include care work in a discussion about solarpunk.

AH: This essay was an attempt for me to bridge between the predictive analysis of ongoing history by cyberpunk thinkers I followed and this new type of futurist thinking I was seeing not from the older gurus but from the younger crowd, from people just a little bit younger than me. A core part of the essay tries to cast solarpunk in the light of something that Bruce Sterling (a successful novelist and one of the originators of the term cyberpunk, and one of the editors of Mirrorshades, a classic cyberpunk anthology) was saying a lot in the early teens: “The future is about old people in big cities afraid of the sky.” 

If you want to predict the future, rather than the future being about X technology or gadget or the rise of web Y or whatever, we should just look at the things that seem like unshakable inevitabilities: people are getting older on the planet as a whole (because we’re living longer and we’re having fewer kids so the demographics of how old the average person is are shifting); the vast majority of the planet now lives in cities and pretty much everyone else is trying to get there, we’re urbanizing very quickly; and the climate crisis is impending. 

So I tried to say, This is where we’re at. If we’re going to imagine a science fiction that is youthful and hopeful and fresh, then we have to recognize these realities, because none of them are going to change very easily. Care work is super important and has been consistently devalued by capitalism over the last few decades. The end of our lives is increasingly miserable for more and more people, even those who are ostensibly middle- and upper class. In that context, if we’re talking about family life, the kinds of jobs that are in the background, the kind of work that’s going on, there’s just going to need to be a lot of that. There’s going to need to be more multi-generational households. 

There are a lot of people you can imagine being your solarpunk heroes whose day job is being a long-term care nurse. It’s going to be a core issue that communities are going to have to deal with, unless they are communities with no old people. But if your solarpunk communities don’t have any old people in them, then all the old people are somewhere else, and if you’re going to save the world and make it sustainable, you have to do so for them as well. 

History has borne this out. COVID has been a horror for the elderly population; that’s where so many of the deaths have come from, nursing homes and among the elderly. All of our benign neglect turned into extremely malign neglect in that context. So if we’re going to have a world organized around more just principles, this is something we have to figure out. My parents are getting older, and figuring out the right thing to do by them, and how to ensure that my life and our lives are able to move forward, and one or the other of us doesn’t drag us down, and I don’t put them to the side, or any of those things—those are the intricacies of modern relationships that offer solarpunk a lot of grist for drama and storytelling, and is the base stuff of imagining how people live.

Also, there has been a general shift away from work being about showing up to a workplace, a bullshit job in an office, or about manufacturing things in a factory, to work being about care—caring for each other, caring for the land, caring for nonhumans, caring for crops, caring for landscapes of the urban variety. We’ve got plenty of big stuff to build too, we’ve got a lot of machines to construct to have a shot at a sustainable future, but more and more we’ll probably see a shift in that.

Especially since it seems like people are increasingly not wanting to spend a lot of their lives in service jobs that are increasingly thankless and way behind on wages—there are all these walkouts and the “Great Resignation” happening here in the States—the shift of the primary locus of the post-industrial economy from service to care is a pretty good bet. As a futurist you could predict that and you’d probably be right.

EA: A good part of your essay is on cities. I’ll read a small paragraph that you wrote:

“Cities don’t die. Cities happen where people gather, and people gather in cities. Because of this, the cities we have today are largely going to be the cities we have for hundreds of years. They will grow and sprawl where they can. We cannot start anew from scratch; we must reuse and refurbish the built environment. To paraphrase Sterling: the wreckage of the unsustainable is our frontier. What we build never goes away; often it must be lived in.”

When a lot of people think of solarpunk, it’s two things: one is like the Shire but with technology, and the other is highrise buildings but with green balconies. If you image-search “solarpunk,” you’ll see some of that. But the stories I’ve been reading, and your essay as well, go against that tendency. How would you view the relationship between solarpunk and cities? 

AH: Again, this was a cautionary note to the people who I saw, at the time, doing a lot of this new imagining: Don’t try to imagine idealistic communities that are off the grid or not engaged with real places. You can; I’ve read plenty of good stories that start from that point. But if we don’t change our cities, then we don’t succeed. All the bad things coming to our civilization are just going to come if we don’t change how our cities look and feel and provide for people, and how they work from a logistics and transportation standpoint.

From a pure sustainability standpoint, there’s energy efficiencies you get from having people live densely that we just have to leverage. From a futurist standpoint, if we were to do a random-person-generator in 2030 or 2050, almost certainly that person is going to live in a city. The vast majority of people are going to live somewhere we consider urban or suburban. 

Yes, we need to change how we build; we need to stop building for planned obsolescence, and start trying to build new things that last a long time, that will last into a solid long Now of hundreds or even thousands of years, or can be maintained to. But the two ways we get distracted are by running off into the woods and building a little Shire, or just imagining the perfect future cityscape that is freshly built. This is what a lot of those green architecture renderings look like; they don’t have people in them, at the most they have little render ghosts running around and enjoying the scenery; there aren’t people with jobs and stories and worries and relationships, and friends and lovers and family they’re tied to, inhabiting these places.

If you’ve got a giant brutalist-but-with-greenery structure, it’s not actually solarpunk. It doesn’t become solarpunk until there’s graffiti on it, too. There’s got to be that human handprint. But the question of how we retrofit this stuff is a really interesting and tricky part of the sustainability problem, the wicked problem we face. The idea of, Let’s buy some land! Let’s build a skyscraper arcology that recycles all its water and gets all its energy!—okay, you’ve provided housing for two thousand people, good job. It’s the tiniest part of the problem. 

The new trillion-dollar infrastructure package that just passed has fifteen billion dollars to get rid of lead pipes, and everyone’s like, Oh no, to get rid of America’s lead pipes, you definitely need at least thirty to fifty billion dollars—Oh, just don’t live where there’s lead pipes! Just go out into the unspoiled world and build afresh! We can’t do that. People live there; we need the housing; people have lived there a long time; we don’t want to kick them out of their homes, they’re part of communities; the houses with lead pipes are part of a fabric. It’s much trickier work, from an imagination standpoint, to do that, because you’ve got to tear up streets, and it’s annoying to do this in places where people have to deal with the construction noises, and all these inconveniences.

In my new book that’s coming out, there’s a little bit I’m quite fond of. There are five scenarios, and one of them is more of a solarpunk utopian one, where we’ve mostly handled the problems (or are on our way). They’re at the climate negotiations, and the narrator of this section is from California, and he sees these swaggering guys from Africa come in, from Ghana and Nigeria and South Africa, various places, and he’s like, Oh man, they were so lucky, they were able to not get stuck with all this zombie development that we’re up to our necks in, in California, still trudging along. We built the modern world, but we built it wrong, and these people have gotten to skip a lot of our mistakes!

The implication is they’ve built these Afrofuturist visions, and Americans are stuck burdened with the previous century’s mistakes, and that takes longer to dispose of than to create these arcologies afresh.

EA: You just made an interesting link, the relationship between solarpunk and utopia. I don’t see them as necessarily the same thing, but they are definitely in conversation with one another.

You write, “Punks are an essentially antisocial or at least countercultural force, rejecting and attacking the norm. In this case, that means understanding that the beautiful clothes and buildings solarpunk envisions are likely to be surrounded by something very different: the cracked concrete of decaying infrastructure, the smudged plastic of cheaply-made gadgets, the intimidating glass and steel of finance fortresses.”

Would you define solarpunk as a utopic genre? What do you see as the relationship between solarpunk and utopias?

AH: Clearly, a lot of people who are inspired by solarpunk are inspired in a utopian way. They see this, and their imagination is cracking open how we imagine utopia. But plenty of the work that gets done is not engaged in this near-future, intermediary time where we’re trying to solve huge problems, and Let’s turn our literary camera to what’s happening among these weirdo solarpunk people who are bucking the norms and rebelling against conventions and power structures! Are they the “revolutionary class” in the Marcuse way that is going to be able to overthrow the hegemonic forces? 

That’s the section I’m most interested in. I like utopias and their discontents. I like imagining we’ve got a Green New Deal and we’ve fixed all these problems, but what is the drama? What is the thing that’s going to have people griping about it? Tell a story about that. 

I don’t want to box anyone out; Becky Chambers’s novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built—Becky can correct me on this if she feels like it, but it seems like it would not exist in its current incarnation had solarpunk as an aesthetic discussion not happened. It’s a great story. It’s fresh and nice and very much We live in a society that is fundamentally good and just, and it’s still not going to make us happy, but we’re going to be empowered to seek out our happiness—and that puts responsibility upon us to do so and to get it right. 

We have to include that kind of work. There has been tons of that sort of utopian imagining. I was a story reviewer for a climate fiction contest that Grist had earlier this year, the “Imagine 2200” contest [2021]; me and Sarena Ulibarri and Tobias Buckell cracked down to the top twenty out of nine hundred-some stories. Of them, tons were solarpunk utopias. That is something we need to engage with and write. 

A couple years ago, the science fiction writer Karl Schroeder tweeted something about how people would prefer dystopias they understand to utopias the don’t understand. Wherever you’re at in the world, you are, if you’re a living person—some people are in such desperation that they will take anything else, but for a lot of people, we’re just on the border: we know we’ve got problems, but we are surviving. We know there’s a place for us in the world; we are scraping by. If you go to those people and say, We’re going to change everything, we’re going to up-end the whole system, we’re going to change how we make laws, we’re going to change how our communities are formed, we’re going to change our households! it’s not unreasonable for those people to go with the devil they know: I’d rather keep this world where I know there’s a place for me than embrace a radical vision where there might not be.

So we have to help them see themselves in these futures, telling utopian stories in which people can be like, Okay, so that’s what I would be up to were we to abolish capitalism! That’s how I would go about my day and find meaning in my life, that’s what the content of my memories and relationships would be. That kind of work is really important. So I don’t think there’s any need to box it out of solarpunk.

If we’re serious about this as a punk genre, and not a call to a broader utopian thinking—the solarpunk pieces I find the most effective and that I try to write are the ones about bucking the norms of society, about individuals who are the punks, the counterculture, who are doing something inherently not-the-mainstream. Because that’s where a lot of innovation happens, where a lot of cool, dramatic ideas happen, where people who, if we prefigure them, they may be prefiguring the further future; they might be the lead of a trend that will soon encompass millions and millions.

Clearly, solarpunk is a reaction against dystopian thinking. In a way, that was having a moment in the early teens: The Hunger Games, Elysium, and so on. That was the grist of a lot of American pop culture particularly, and particularly YA culture. For the youth who first started talking about solarpunk on Tumblr, this is the kind of thing they were trying to chart an alternative to. We don’t want to do dystopian—we want to accept the dystopian reality and then figure out what the utopian tendency is within that, but as the countervailing wind.

There are different strategies we can take, different kinds of seeing instruments we can use, to try and solve these problems. It’s a post-normal situation; we are using this genre, this literature, to actively figure out what our future should look like. A lot of the future emerges from material conditions; a lot of it is out of our hands. But a lot of the people who were inspired by cyberpunk, who maybe weren’t the science fiction authors but the people being like, Ooh, yeah, this is interesting—some of them went on to make some real cyberpunk dystopian technology. Some of them went on to become Silicon Valley types and were inspired by that literature to get into computers. So if we can create a literature that inspires people to get into ecosystem repair and sustainability, carbon removal and permaculture, then hell yeah, let’s do that.

EA: It’s become almost a joke online, that the recent announcement of those robot dogs and the whole Facebook Ray-Ban glasses—it really feels like it’s coming out of a Black Mirror episode. And at some point that comparison feels like not enough anymore; there was a time some years ago when watching Black Mirror felt like it was a critique of something happening today and that we shouldn’t do that—and a lot of it, we basically did do that. It really feels like this was a response to a moment, a response to something that was happening, but right now I wouldn’t be as interested if they came up with a new season—because reality is already pretty dystopic. 

You write, “I suspect that at some point in the next decade or so, it will truly dawn on us that the increasingly inhospitable climate is of our own making, the result of policy decisions and political failures.” As it happens, we’re recording this while COP26 is still happening. It’s been both underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time, for me. That being said, it is also true that the momentum has very clearly shifted in the past few years, especially when it comes to climate activism. I’m thirty, and I’m old enough to remember that there was a time when it really felt like there was a very small number of people actively talking about the climate other than climate scientists, Indigenous activists, and so on. It wasn’t a daily concern.

I don’t know if we’re a majority, but it definitely seems this is shifting. Given that you wrote this six years ago, and given all of what has happened since, how would you see those six years in relation to how solarpunk has been developing? Has it been focusing on different things? It’s definitely bigger than it used to be—climate fiction as a broader umbrella than solarpunk. How have you seen this change?

AH: I went to COP24 a few years ago, and that was really enlightening. The book I’ve got coming out is set at five different versions of the COP, and is very much about that culture, that particular political project. On the one hand, it’s such an uphill climb. The framework and the institutions are very flawed, and don’t really have the leverage we need them to have, and we’re muddling along. Had we known the way things would go, maybe we wouldn’t be working with a consensus-based UN model, the honor system we have. 

It worked for the Montreal Protocol to fix the hole in the ozone layer, but it turns out that climate change is just a very different problem than [chloro]fluorocarbons eating into the ozone layer; it’s a different class of pollutants that are entangled in our economy in a very different way, and the moment in which we were trying to deal with the hole in the ozone layer was also the moment when DuPont chemical’s patent on freon was coming up on expiration, so capital was all for it—Yeah, let’s change out all our refrigerants and sell all new refrigerators and make a lot of money!

Increasingly, that’s how it looks now. Most of capital is starting to be like, It seems like we could make a lot of money if we put up a lot of new solar panels and wind farms! Gosh, they kind of just run for free! They’re so cheap and we can sell the energy! Companies want to buy offsets! Capital is coming around in a way that it wasn’t in 2015; that’s certainly good for our chances. I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to get us to any kind of utopian or truly sustainable scenario. Fossil fuel is still digging in pretty hard. 

This is the hardest thing human beings have ever tried to do. It’s the most wicked of wicked problems, and we only get one shot at it. The best we can do in terms of running experiments to find the best strategy is to tell little science fiction stories and try to learn from those, because we only have one Earth to enact our strategy on. 

There’s a section in my book, in the most dystopian of the scenarios, in which a bunch of characters are holed up in the bar talking about what went wrong: What could we, as the UNFCCC and our predecessors in this institution, have done better? There’s tons of things we could have done better. But you never step in the same river twice, you never work on the same wicked problem twice. The fact that we’re working with this set of institutions, with this set of diplomatic procedures—that is the problem. That’s what we have to solve for, not this other hypothetical in which the Kyoto Protocol is formulated differently and Al Gore won the 2000 American election, and so on.

All that said, watching this COP there was so much build-up for, and Biden’s going there empty-handed because we have a coal baron in the senate who’s just going to say no—it’s very possible that we will not have any regulations that shut down existing fossil fuel infrastructure, but we do have a bunch of subsidies that build out clean energy. In that situation, man, do we need some solarpunks! We need some solarpunks to push the boundaries of the renewable and clean energy technologies so we can out-compete the fossil infrastructure even faster. Because the powers that be aren’t going to let us regulate those out of existence, we’re just going to have to prove they’re worse than the alternative.

And we might need some punks to go out and do some direct action, make it harder to run this particular stack of infrastructure, make it a lot less profitable to extract and burn fossil fuels, with a variety of tactics. It’s not a great situation; it would be a better situation for all of us if we could smoothly pass the correct policies. But in the absence of that, we need a countercultural force to help get us on a better track.

It’s not the best COP so far, but like you said, there’s a lot of energy in climate now. And the basic prediction I wrote in 2015—we’ve had blood skies over California; we’ve had huge storms flooding major American cities. In 2015 we’d had some of that, we’d had hurricane Sandy, which was a classic superstorm-that-flooded-New-York situation that felt like it was ripped from climate fiction headlines, but now we’ve really had them—and in the context of the pandemic here in which everyone was really finely tuned to disaster unfolding. For a lot of people, all we could do was sit in our homes and watch.

So we’ve checked that box. Particularly here in America, there’s an increasingly irrational reactionary segment of the population that is living deeply out-of-touch with reality, but lots of people are like, Oh, yikes, this is not going to be good! Lots of people have experienced climate disasters. Obviously it’ll keep getting worse; one of the things we’ve found since 2015, and honestly since I started writing my scenarios book, is that the climate is a lot more sensitive than we thought. It turns out that 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming is a lot nastier than we thought it was going to be. 

That’s where we’re at now, more or less, and I don’t think we want to stay here; that just ramps up the eventual necessity of climate repair and getting all that carbon out of the atmosphere so we can stabilize at a lower average temperature that is less chaotic. On the other hand, coal barons are still in charge of American policy, and we’ve still got plenty of coal, and that’s continuing to be built and extracted in China and elsewhere. But it does seem like the appetite for coal is a lot less than earlier modelers predicted.

It’s going to be real hard to hit 1.5C as the top of our warming. It might turn out to be a lot harder than we thought to hit 2C; even if it were easier, it’s going to be a lot nastier to live through. So we’re making adjustments; we’re finding out that reality does not conveniently match up with what the carefully-negotiated UN targets are, and we need to be engaging in that process.

The fact that solarpunk has become a thing now—when I wrote that piece, I was like, Here’s an interesting idea, let’s make this a thing. And it’s definitely a thing now! There are multiple anthologies; it seems like almost all the big names in science fiction are writing near-future climate fiction novels (some are more utopian than others); the name “solarpunk” is no longer a joke. And it’s a big town; I’m constantly finding out about people doing solarpunk projects I’ve never heard of—which is great! This wasn’t the case in 2015.

Like you said, there’s a lot more energy, and it’s a lot more exciting—and the stakes are a lot higher, so it’s doubly on us to do right.

EA: For my part, I’m trying to do more episodes on this podcast when it comes to solarpunk, as well as writing stuff from time to time. The topics I tend to go through on this podcast tend to be pretty heavy, and arguably nothing is heavier than climate change at the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future. I was looking for something that could offer me energy for the present—I would read these stories that are set in the future, and I obviously know that they’re fiction, but they would affect me in a different way than if I were reading The Lord of the Rings. 

I know that book is a fantasy, but I’m not reading it with the hope that it has something to offer me in the present. And that’s fine! Not all books have to. But I definitely needed something that could do that, and solarpunk as a genre ended up becoming that for me. Part of my goal on this podcast, among other things, is to introduce this speculative movement to a wider audience.

That being said, I want to mention two of your recent works. One is a short story you wrote as part of Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures. Can you talk to us a bit about how you would imagine multispecies kinships?

AH: That story, “The Mammoth Steps,” was originally printed in Terraform, which was the science fiction vertical on VICE Motherboard, and was reprinted in the Multispecies book—which I’m glad at, because multispecies thinking is very near and dear to my heart. Back in 2016, I stopped eating meat, mostly for climate reasons, but when I did, it really felt like a whole new vista of moral thinking opened up to me. Because I wasn’t trying to justify my choices and my lifestyle anymore, I could see more clearly the horrible things that we do to nonhumans that we eat, that we enslave, whose homes we destroy, that we hunt for sport. And I was able to see nonhumans as subjects more readily, with their own opinions and memories and inner life experiences, that are trying to live a life—not a human life, but a different kind of life.

That was a revelation that crept into my thinking, and this story was an early attempt at manifesting some of those ideas—some of which were also from taking classes and talking to people in the conservation world and feeling like the most radical position about animal conservation on the table right now is: draw a map and say, Humans don’t go in there. We’re going to patrol against poachers with guns, and let the wild animals live their wild lives. If we do that to human beings, that’s called a reservation; that’s a ghetto. That, to me, shows a lack of imagination about how we might not just have a more just relationship but real partnerships with nonhuman beings.

Particularly to ones that are smart—they have language, they have culture, they have relationships and social structures—like elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, octopi. Some of those, it seems to me, were they on offer, might want to not live in a wilderness preserve but live in a city and have an apartment, have a job, and be able to earn money to spend how they wish on doing things that they like. What would our cities look like if they were built to have multiple different species engaged in it as a project?

There’s a what if there. We have all this computation power; we’re spending a lot of it making really dumb-looking NFTs. There’s a technological debate that can push in two different directions there, but we spend a lot of power analyzing data to serve people ads. What if instead we put a lot of that computational power toward figuring out how to communicate with other species, to analyzing their language and making sense of it? That’s a classic sci-fi what if. What if we invented elephant language translation?

That’s what’s in this story, which is about a boy and his friend, who is a de-extincted mammoth in Siberia, and they go on a roadtrip together; they walk their way all the way down to Thailand to meet elephants, and find that the elephants there have rebelled and are now trying to build a more integrated human-elephant society where elephants are not a slave class.

I’ve got another book in the works that’s been on my mind for a long time; it’s an alternate history in which we have had a whole bunch of revolutions that have gotten us to a different political place where we are sharing our world with other species—and it’s a detective novel. It’s a socialist detective novel in a world of talking elephants.

EA: And you have one that is upcoming as well. Can you talk a bit about that?

AH: Yeah, in April 2022; it’s my first English-language book (I have a book of short fiction published in Italian). I wrote it mostly as my master’s thesis for sustainability. It’s inspired by a set of scenarios used by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that informs the COP and all the UN negotiations. They have a set of scenarios called the “Shared Socio-Economic Pathways” that were used, some of them, in the AR6 [Sixth Assessment Report] in different ways. These were replacements for the previous sets of scenarios called the RCPs [representative concentration pathways], that are just about how much carbon we dump. 

The SSPs are like, Okay, these things are super socially entagled; let’s lay bare what our assumptions are about how the future of the economy and society is going to look; that informs questions of whether five percent GDP growth means more emissions ot less. There are five SSPs. SSP one is the sustainability scenario, where we manage to more or less smoothly get to a sustainable world; things go well for us and we don’t meet a lot of challenges either to mitigation or adaptation. SSP two is middle-of-the-road; present trends continue. SSP three is way out in the chart space, that’s a nasty one: there’s global breakdown of institutions, there’s lots of regional conflict.

Then there are two to the sides. SSP four is the high-inequality scenario where we manage to cut our emissions but economies become really unequal and we do a bad job of adapting to climate change, so the impacts of climate change are felt really disproportionately by poor nations and poor people. Then there’s SSP five, which is a scenario in which we say, Okay, let’s not even bother to shift off fossil fuels; let’s use all that cheap energy to hyperdevelop the developing world and ask if it’s better to create all this economic growth and adapt our way through he consequences.

When I first encountered these, I was like, These are science fiction stories! These are climate fiction stories. So I talked with scholars who’d worked on them, and decided to try to write a set of stories that illustrated these five scenarios, and I decided I wanted them to be a comparative experiment where I’m eliminating as many variables as I can. So in a way, it’s one story told five different ways. It’s the story of COP60, and there’s an overlapping cast of characters that you see in all the stories—but because they’re in different scenarios, we’ve made different choices between now and 2035, 2040; by the time they’re at it in 2054, they’re all living very different lives—they’ve grown up differently—and the COP is a different kind of institution in each of these scenarios.

I tried to create an experiment, and see what it was like to take one core situation and splay it out onto this SSP chart space. It’s really fun; I’m very proud of the book. If some of your listeners are academics who want to teach about climate change or climate fiction or environmental humanities, it’s got a section for that which talks pretty extensively about the SSPs as a thinking tool, and about climate fiction as a seeing instrument for talking about the future. I’m hoping people will find it useful for classes, and I think the book is also pretty entertaining. Some of the funniest jokes I’ve ever written are in there, and I do the full gamut between dystopian futures of different flavors and also a utopian one to cap it off.

For a lot of us who are now starting to pay attention to things like the COP, the UN process that sort of holds all our future in its hands to some degree, I think the book is probably pretty useful in understanding.

EA: What are three books you recommend to listeners, and why?

AH: I honestly think it might be most useful for people who are interested in solarpunk to read some contemporary cyberpunk too, and see the points of contrast. A few of those that listeners might want to check out are Infomocracy by Malka Older, which is the best book about globalization; it really gets at what it will feel like to live in a truly globalized society, and is so bristling with imagination and tons of political ideas—as someone who wrote about how solarpunk should think about politics, I think we should consider it.

Gnomon is a great modern cyberpunk book by Nick Harkaway that is so literarily ambitious—it should be on everyone’s radar. Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan is another super contemporary story that in some senses you could imagine telling a solarpunk version of, about what happens if the internet were to boom go away and the kinds of collapse that would come with that. Those are all really educational books to dive into that offer good points of contrast.

For solarpunk stuff, I mentioned Becky Chambers’s The Psalm of the Wild-Built. That’s a very beautiful little text. Stan Robinson has his own UNCCC book, The Ministry for the Future—probably the most harrowing piece of climate fiction ever is the first chapter of that book, about a deadly heatwave in India. That really does what no other apocalyptic far-future post-climate-change-wasteland book has ever done: really bring home how scary it is when the weather turns against your body. And the book is full of really cool ideas.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is another one that is kind of solarpunk minus the solar; it doesn’t have a lot to say about the energy questions that are essential to solarpunk, but in terms of social organization and imagining radical ways of connecting with each other and living and opting out of the hegemonic system—which we may or may not be able to do; that’s up in the air. We’re all making a calculus of whether we think there is one hegemonic system that overpowers everything else and whether we can change that system. It’s different in each of the quadrants that creates.

Solarpunk is of the opinion that we maybe can’t change the hegemonic system, but it is not totalizing; there is a space where you can build an alternative. There’s good arguments to be made for each of these quadrants: that capitalism is a totalizing system, but we have an opportunity to change it; we can build a mass movement and do mass politics that is not countercultural, that stems from the needs of the majoritarian culture and the organizing, power, and position in the economy of the working class—a more traditional Marxist approach.

I hope people are inspired by solarpunk but that they think carefully about that calculation, and not necessarily assume that the best strategy is to go and build a little commune and try to have a garden and do permaculture and have rooftop solar. That’s a fine thing to do, but it could be that the best strategy is striking and organizing our workplaces and taking to the streets and shutting down the economy until the powers-that-be do what we want, seizing the means of production. These are all things we should consider are on the table, and make the best choices we can.

EA: Andrew, thanks a lot. We’ve spoken quite a bit; I appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your day to speak to me. 

AH: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.