#sunvault

So I’m looking around at my list of Solarpunk book recs, and I decided to see how many of them can I buy on Bookshop.org. (I’m tempted to put them into little free libraries to share with people.) Sad to see I couldn’t find the Solarpunk dragon anthology. However, I did find out that it’s on internet archive!

Book Bingo 2026 - Book #2

Those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

Why is this genre promising? Because in Solarpunk, energy is explicitly political. Solarpunk presents the hope in community, in recognition, and in nourishing the potential of every individual. The solar energy foundation of these worlds is an objective correlative to this simple, clean, frictionless identification and affective flow. Whereas fossil fuels obscure the sun and turn our attention to the ground — contingent upon a rape of the land, a hegemony of extraction, and an emotional structure of dominance and control — solar energy is understood by contrast as gentle, non-centralized, and non-mediated. Solar energy here represents an openness to the outside: a communication and shaking of hands with the universe. It’s not just renewable: solar energy is conversational, loving, full of joy in relating. Solar energy provides a fruitful and flexible ground in the imaginary for experiments in being human and being social while it also preserves the ecological boundary conditions of our own existence. And that is the root of Solarpunk: an energy culture that serves as a platform for experiments in being, rather than a closure of it.