Phoebe Wagner

The way that I approach it is that solarpunk is sort of this genre that spans literature and media, video games, and that it imagines new futures in the midst of an opposition to environmental collapse and importantly then works to create those futures.

And solarpunk stories also recognize that the climate crisis and environmental collapse are all entangled and that we can't have environmental justice without social justice, which is what starts to separate it from environmental literature or climate fiction.

And then importantly, there's this technological aspect of solar punk I think a lot of people really enjoy.

And it's fun to play around with.

And this idea that humanity needs to find sort of a balance with technology.

But it's really about the right technological tool and the right moment.

I think it's helpful to sort of place it within the punk genre.

So when we think about cyberpunk, which is this more dystopian sort of concern about technology, and then we got to steampunk, which was thinking about the Industrial Revolution, and then we get to solarpunk, which is thinking about environment, technology, and also social justice, right?

And so even though subgenres sometimes become unnecessary to have so many different names, I think this was important because of the punk aspect.

There is a punk part of solar punk that separates it from climate fiction, which doesn't necessarily have to have some of those more punk like DIY community focused aspects.

So it's relatively recent.

So in 2008 is when the word first appeared.

And then it became popular on Tumblr and other social media websites from like, you know, 2014, 2015.

And then we get the first anthology in 2012, which actually came out of Brazil and is written in Portuguese and has since been translated and it's just called Solar Punk.

And then my anthology Sun Vault shows up on the scene in 2017.

as sort of the first general English anthology to include art and poetry and short fiction.

So right around the 2010s, we were seeing a lot of dystopian storytelling.

You know, we had Hunger Games, we had Mad Max Fury Road, which I love.

I think that's a great movie.

But as a first-year graduate student in an environmental creative writing program, I was growing concerned that if we were primarily imagining