Kimberly Adams

Hello, everyone.

I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Look, with everything going on in the world and the economy, we all need something to smile about.

Now, as you know, I personally love sci-fi, and I recently stumbled upon a subgenre called solarpunk, and it's been making me smile as I've been learning more about it.

it so i hope you want to learn more about it too here to make us smart about this is phoebe wagner she's a writer academic and editor of three solar punk anthologies including sun vault stories of solar punk and eco speculation dr wagner welcome to the show thanks so much for having me kimberly i'm excited to be here so let's start with the basics what is solar punk like how do you usually describe it to people

Why do we need a label like solar punk?

So give us the history.

Where did the solar punk genre come from?

Like, when did it get going?

And what drew you to solarpunk in the first place?

You know, it's so funny.

Well, I guess it's not funny.

It's kind of sad that you hear so many people today talking about how we're living the dystopian sci-fi predictions of the past.

And what kind of captured my imagination when I stumbled upon Solar Punk was this idea that if we can imagine these kind of awful technology-fueled futures that then become reality, what happens if we imagine better technology-fueled futures?

All right.

We are going to take a quick break, but we will be right back.

All right, we are back to talk more about solar punk with Phoebe Wagner.

And can you tell us a little bit about the genre's relationship, particularly to the green energy transition?

How do Solarpunk stories deal with economic issues?