Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards a Solarpunk future

First I'm hearing of solarpunk, and what a wonderful rabbit hole it is. Thanks for sharing. :)

Interesting bit about solarpunk music. Aurora seems like a good fit, the vast majority of her lyrics dovetails with their ethos. See Daydreamer, The Seed, Apple Tree, Conqueror, Warrior.

YES! Everyone come to Solarpunk >:) /r/solarpunk is one of the few subreddits I still regularly visit (and share content between the two).

One thing I'm craving is "traditional-conflict free story" and I think Solarpunk is a really really good avenue for that kind of thing. I kind of want to see the exact opposite of a cyberpunk story: Give me a story about a local wanderer finding a Solarpunk society that is either good or a utopic (I don't need it to be a utopia, fuck at this point just give me a world that isn't on fire) and just have the character walk through their society, learning about how they live and how their government works, if one even exists! There is a non-trivial number of people in Solarpunk that are anarchists! An ideology that most everyone has misunderstandings about what it is and/or what an anarchist world/society would look like. Walk me through it! Have the protagonist ask questions and wrestle with the differences between their society and his! What morals and philosophies have gained/lost importance in this new world? If the society has flaws, have the characters talk about them! Leave it open to the reader if this new society is realistic or good. I don't need a society to be fatally flawed, or the government to be covering up some big secret that the protagonist must uncover and attempt to defeat like in Cyberpunk. Maybe the problem they face is passing legislation is incredibly slow, or the government is based on direct democracy which is open for lots of flaws to be explored. How do they vote? FPTP? Ranked Choice? Neither? A voting method that is novel/underexplored? Do some situations use one voting mechanism and anther uses a different one because situationally each one has strengths for that problem, or because of how many people are involved in the decision makes one option better than the other? Look at the cost and benefits of a vertical vs horizontal hierarchy based society. What about societies that are that have a very fluid system of laws that are easy to change quick to be voted on rather than what we have now? Does race exist in the future? Does race exist in the future in the same way we view it now? Do police exist? Prisons? Private property? Capitalism? And this is me just strictly thinking about politics and societal organization. It doesn't even get into new technology, unique cultures, the actual personalities of the individuals, etc. Importantly! In none of these does it have to paint one as good and one as flawed or bad (it can, and on some topics you could argue it should, but not a requirement). There's a world of questions out there that could be written about and I think are super interesting if looked at from a solarpunk lens.

Just give me some hopeful books that talk about a better future. I feel like there is a wealth of questions and interesting stories if people were interested in telling happy stories instead of depressing/negative ones. We know from the success of Amelie that there is a market and people will watch and enjoy movies with low-to-no stakes in the story and tells a happy story with ultimately a happy ending. I'm thinking of something like World Without End except

For a good more in-depth look at the movie I'd suggest Jack Saint's Apocalypse Video. The whole thing is really good, and I think gets at the underlying ideas of what about solarpunk appeals to me. The talk about World Without End specifically is at timestamp 1:05:30.

EDIT: Wanted to come and add a new thought my partner had. I think a very good example of what I'm looking for is fanfic. As usual, I am going to be doing a fair bit of generalization so this isn't about all fanfic, more that it is significantly easier to find these types of stories in fanfic. But yeah, fanfic is a great example of this. A lot of fanfic is either fleshing out a world they find interesting, or wish fulfillment. You can often tell by looking at the tags if a fanfic is going to have a high or low stakes conflict, and in a lot of them the are "low stakes". Sometimes the "low-stakes" thing is something normally high-stakes but the characters don't react to it like it is high stakes. Or information is given to us the reader to know that the stakes aren't actually as high as they may seem. Or, in a good amount of cases the whole point of the story is "fuck it, I just want to explore this world more so I'm just going to write characters going through their day-to-day life so I can describe the world and how it works". I don't have to worry about the world ending, or major tragedy happening unexpectedly, or a depressing ending (other than an abandoned fic :P nothing worse than that). I know that I'm in for a pretty low-stakes ride where not much depressing or stressful is going to happen and I can just enjoy the world and the characters. I don't want it to come off as I don't think tragedy or darkness or stressful situations have a place in media, I think they do; horror is by far my favorite genre. Moreso I think that media overly-leans into those types of stories and under-value the ability to tell a compelling and interesting low-stakes story, and I think that embrace of "dark gritty antihero" or "What if <superhero, scientific discovery, other good thing> but actually its bad". I'm just tired man. The whole world is a dark and depressing hellscape that is likely going to destroy itself in a horrible fireball. I don't need all my media to be depressing too.

Something about the writing style irritates me. That said, though ... yeah, first I've heard of Solarpunk, too, and I'm grateful for the discovery.

I'm disappointed that we settled on the term "solarpunk" when "greenpunk" was, like, right there as an option.