In Québec, there’s a long tradition of telling scary stories on the darkest nights of the year. As “mon pays, ceci n’est pas un pays, c’est hiver”* fills with endless snow and the days grow short, people gathered together around the campfires and told tales of werewolves, demons, devils, and wendigos. Some of the most famous stories in Québécois folklore, like Rose LaTulippe or the Chasse-Galerie, arise from these long-ago campfire tails in the dead of subarctic night. And none are more scary, none more hair-raising, than the tales told on New Year’s Night, when the stars are bright and cold and clear and the dim fire throws shadows that could be loup-garou with cold breath, and the chill is always hovering too close to the tiny circle of warmth.
So here, free, two days only, is mon conte de Nouvel’An.
In 2109, there is no more space program.
No more Discovery.
No more Final Frontiers.
I wrote “No More Final Frontiers” after they announced the Space Shuttle program was ending, with no clear hope forward other than hitching a ride with the Russians. SpaceX remained unclaimed. Since it’s been claimed, since the Dragon roars through the sky…I still see this as a possible future, one to warn against. The more Elon Musk tries to gobble up outer space as his personal demesne, muscling out competition while deriding nonprofit or governmental space exploration, crowning himself King of Mars with wannabe serfs lining up for the pleasure, the more I wonder if one hundred years from now, anyone will remember or care after he inevitably burns out.
I dedicated it to two men who died that year – Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Kyle Bruner, a shipmate of mine on the Lady Washington who died trying to save a woman from getting robbed in the Bahamas. The deaths of these two men are what inspired this particular horror story, this story of time forgot.
For the next forty-eight hours, “No More Final Frontiers” is available for free on Amazon. It’s the story of “Space Dennis,” one of the last crews of a historical reenactment space program, and one of the last to get the news that it’s been shut down. He and his shipmates hatch a plot to steal the space shuttle, but even abandoned property is harder to steal than it looks, and they’ll be faced with the question whether it’s even worth it…
I only read four-star reviews on Amazon. Let me tell you why.
The five-star reviews are all glowing praise that makes a J. J. Abrahms joint look dim, and in their worst cases, are bought and paid for. The one- and two-star reviews are just unrelentingly negative, often miss the point, and though sometimes entertaining on their own for the reviewer’s semi-coherent tangents, are rarely actually informative. If I clicked on the book’s page, I’m generally interested. I want to buy, but I want an honest look at what I’m getting first, and the four-star reviews actually tell you what they like, and a few things they didn’t.
Some of the stories in here are real gems. I’ve highlighted the ones I loved over thepastfewweeks – but when you read it, you might fall in love with “The Salvage at the Selvage” or “The Repairwoman” or maybe even “Scars of Satyagraha” instead. You might find “The Comforting” leaves you cold and you got no love for “Lady Jane.” But it’s the kind of anthology where there’s a favorite for everyone in here somewhere.
And as for the rest? Hell, it’s in the title. Even the mediocre stories (and there are mediocre stories and a few out-and-out duds) are trying to do something new, trying to imagine a future so bright, you gotta wear shades. No tacked-on sad ending, no cheap cynicism, no sudden twist that they were actually all terrible people the whole time. In a world of, as I called the possible future of “Lady Jade,” rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues, sometimes you want the comfort of knowing the author’s either optimistic, or tryin’ real hard to be. And, intellectually, there really are new ideas here, new ways of looking at old problems. Even the worst duds in here have a one weird idea or two.
There’s a couple of typos, a few spots where the italics clearly got away from the proofreader and never came back, and I hope they’ll be fixed for the second edition. But they don’t much interfere with the reading, they’re just irritating.
And, to address the delicate question a few of you have raised in my DMs and emails, here’s my mini-review-in-a-review of “Scars of Satyagraha”.
“Scars of Satyagraha” is the most Quaker story I’ve ever told. Originally intended for an anthology on gender, the prompt made me think of the often opposing genders of Gentleman and Real Man, and Sam caught between them. The rest, the meditation on violence, ahimsa, gender, bodysurfing, and Mafia movies, happened quite naturally. I’m particularly proud of Babuji’s nails, they are splendid.
Sami Chaturvedy is a young woman we would recognize as trans, on an Indian-Nigerian independent Mars where switching bodies is as easy as getting a tattoo, torn between the nonviolent Martian values of her Babuji and the tarnished, violent honor she imagines of her deceased mother’s Yankee heritage. But her childish wishes to connect to her heritage through mafia movies and the Yankee Militia underworld of Mars lands her in hot water faster than you can say Colt .45, and she finds herself forced to choose where she stands in the worst way.
In a lot of ways, this story feels like a trial run for Doña Ana Lucía and …To The Future!. Sam’s Mars feels like an earlier age of the Six Worlds, more open, less dense, but just as eerie. Sami herself is grappling with the same issues of ethnic identity, otherness, and integration that underlie Doña Ana Lucía’s psychology, and, for that matter, mine as a franco-americain, even if she isn’t literally grappling with actual bad guys all that much. But it’s also very much a story unto itself. Sami’s inner conflict is front-and-center, and she an unwilling participant in the action after her youthful disillusionment. Her world is less a spicier Star Trek utopia than it is an alien, weird thing unto itself – a Mars that separated nonviolently but with great vigorousness, inspired by the postcolonial liberations of its two founding cultures.
I hope you like it.
I hope you like the other stories, too. Typos and the occasional dud (but what anthology doesn’t have the occasional dud? Even Dangerous Visions had “Lord Randy, My Son”) aside, The Future’s So Bright is an anthology I’ll be thumbing through again in the future. However bright it turns out to be.
DOCTOR LADY and her FLYBOY EX have JUST TWELVE HOURS to get THE ANTIDOTE to THE PRESIDENT or what remains of South America will fall to THE WARLORDS.
Of course they are. You knew that just reading the slugline.
In less than a page, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.
“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden, is solarpulp. Such pure, undiluted solarpulp that I absolutely know she watched Only Angels Have Wings the night before she started this story. And, much like knowing that of course they make it in time, that’s no bad thing. Bowden has the breathless pace and suddenly-exotic climate changed environs I want from my pulps, breathing new life into old twists (La Paz is an island, the big storm is really big).
Cressida Jade, one of formerly-North-America’s foremost experts on snake venom, is the only one who can save President Ricarda, whose life is the only thing holding South America together by a thread, from the mysterious snakebite that may have been deliberately set on her by regional warlords. But she can’t possibly make it in time, until Jack Lacy
Whadda guy!
steps in with his trusty flying rig the Lady Jade. But Jack and Cressida have a history behind them, and the mother of all storms ahead. Though the mission to save the president is never in doubt, will Jack and Cressida be able to save themselves? Rounding out the cast are Cressida’s beau Luke Araba and Vice President Waru Dangati.
My only complaint about this story is that there’s too little of it! Having made just these kinds of cuts myself in the past, this story cries out that it was a fantastic ten or fifteen thousand words, full of derring do and strange adventures, but had to get cut down to size to submit to this anthology. I’d love to see whatever original version might be floating around on Ms. Bowden’s hard drive, or more adventures in this universe or one just next door. The world could certainly use mere derring-do and strange adventure in the wake of rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues.
But that’s, hopefully, a nice problem to have. At any rate, I was thoroughly surprised and delighted to find two-fisted solarpunk escapades between the pages of The Future So Bright. It’s kind of future that, if there were enough like Cressida Jade and Jack Lacy in it, it would be safe to live in, yet not too dull to be worth living in.
Last week, I mentioned the no-nonsense prose most of the other stories had, in contrast to Regina Clarke’s lyrical dream-voice. Here, just as Clarke’s dreamlike language works for “Night Circus,” that no-nonsense, hard-boiled prose works for Kevin David Anderson’s “The Comforting.” Both are featured in The Future’s So Bright, now available wherever better books are sold.
Detective Lentil sits in his faded office, a gruff cop of the old schools, who knows better how to get information out of people than computers, and prefers it that way. This time, though, it’s not the leggy blonde who walks in and breathlessly asks after her dear, disappeared husband (though I’m sure Lentil would have preferred it that way), but a beardless boy name of Jasper Casper, who’d like to report an assault by his plaid comforter.
Yes, the blanket.
“Just the facts, man.”
And as Lentil tries his damnedest Joe Friday to get this kook’s report so he can go home to his empty apartment, more reports start coming in (and walking in) of a crazed plaid comforter, loose on the town, who’s finally snapped his last thread and taking it out on an indifferent world. Soon, instead of going home, Lentil, Jasper, and Ms. Peaches are racing across town, where the rogue blanket is atop the towering Skyrell Corporation building, and everyone but Lentil are taking selfies. What follows is a hilarious, Adamsian-but-not-quite-as-dense satire of misapplied high technology, misanthropic blankets, and one very misguided corporate turtleneck.
Which makes sense, Anderson specifically mentions “a scene by the late great Terry Pratchett” as his inspiration for the piece. While his voice is unmistakably American, in that New York minute sort of way, he does have something of both Pratchett’s and Adams’ absolute poker-faced voice going for him. Although he affirms his distrust of technology (like Detective Lentil, he still exclusively plays the vinyl he bought in the eighties, and refuses to own a cell phone), Anderson’s criticism of technology and the culture it breeds lacks the cruelty and mean-spiritedness of a lot of similar “satires.” I work in a tech company, own an iPhone, and handle tech support for a living, and I was laughing my ass off at the dialogue even when it wasn’t silly, because I know these people. For someone who despises tech, Anderson seems to spend a lot of time with tech heads.
It makes me wonder exactly which Pratchett scene it was, the one that has nothing to do with technology, that he read.
Next week, the wild, unexpected ride of “Lady Jade.”
Those were the first words out of my mouth when I finished this story.
…that’s a good thing.
I still haven’t figured out if Regina Clarke‘s “Night Circus” is magical fantasy, wondertech sci-fi, or something like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, where the distinction long ago grew moot. It starts with the short paragraph:
It was said the girl-child dreamed worlds into being. Arain ran to me with news of her arrival from Rengal.
And the entire story is very dreamlike. The narrator, Silla, wanders past flamevines and figs, under the psychic eye of the never-sleeping Preceptor, meets his weirding red-and-green eyes, follows in her father’s otherworldly footsteps, and encounters the golden couple of a disappearing mound beyond dreams out in the wastes of desert quadrant Forty-Two.
That’s not even a third of the way through the story.
Silla must confront the Night Circus, the realm that binds her father, Arain’s mother, and the Preceptor, be offered a choice, and make it freely. That is the way of things, and only her and Arain’s choices will make things different again (possibly by dreaming a new universe into being).
And what of the girl-child?
This Night Circus is second cousin to Bradbury’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the way his Mechanical Hound is to the Hound of the Baskervilles. There are nightshades of Jim and of Will Halloway in Arain and Silla, though who is Halloween’s child is rather less clear here. There’s a lot that’s unclear here, lost in shadows of poetry, give or take a simile, gain or lose a metaphor, disappearing in the smooth sands of Forty-Two like Rea and Tamis’ mound and its Builders. And the thing is – it works. It helps make the story what it is, to create a peculiar taste on the tongue that lingers but never quite settles. Whether I liked them or not, the other stories I’d read had a certain no-nonsense air to them. “The Night Circus” very much does not, and it still had me thinking on it days later.
“Night Circus” is available in The Future’s So Bright, and Regina Clarke’s page can be found here. When I finish the anthology, I’m thinking of picking up “Out of Time,” and see what dreams may come…
Bonjour! I’m happy to report I am no longer sick, and even more happy to report that The Future’s So Bright is now available wherever better books are sold! To celebrate, after my felicitous cigar, I’m taking some time here to review a few of my favorite stories in the anthology. Read short fiction, hein?
“Emergence,” by A.M. Weald, took me by the first line, same as it took its author.
A duster bot was stuck again.
“Emergence” is that rarity of rarities, a post-apocalyptic story I actually enjoyed (otherwise pretty much limited to “By the Waters of Babylon”, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, and “Darkness”). The nature of the apocalypse is background radiation – mentions of long-gone nuclear winter and environmental conservation. The focus here is on the present, and on the future.
The duster bot is the responsibility of Kelle, of undergrounded Pod North, one of the four remaining centers of population on the North American continent. After removing the stuck duster and replacing it on the solar panels with a fresh robot, she flirts by phone with Arjun, of Pod West, who announces with a breathless “Guess. What.” that “they” are planning to link the disparate domes together – maybe even open them completely. They are interrupted by their compulsory time in the sun, where the politely-coercive authorities mandate mingling. Kelle pointedly doesn’t meet anybody, but Arjun does…
This story almost feels like a realistic, solarpunk-ish take on the Fallout vaults, scraped clean of their affected hypercynicism and sickly green filter of over-the-top human suffering. The authorities do seem a tad Orwellian, and the state of the surface and of technology (undergrounded telephone is the only form of communication except with the few hundred people you grew up smelling, and if you want electricity in your room, you better get biking on your post-Pelaton) give pause. But as disruptive as the hour of sunbathing is (repeatedly), and as awkward as the mandatory mingling is, these are recognizably ordinary people living ordinary lives, not beat-down sufferers like Winston Smith or exceptional culture rebels like John the Savage. The casual polyamory (with its attendant little dramas) just seems an extension of their ordinary lives.
Spoilers
And seeing the happy family out on the surface, reseeding the Earth with rich life, was sweet as can be – a victory for the common man.
What really gets me is the little details – the landline phones like Battlestar Galactica, Kelle’s touch starvation, Arjun’s casual romance with another man and how this interacts with his feelings for “his person” Kelle, the description of the sun room (which sounds exactly like coffee hour at St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea[tm]), the way they guess the ineffeable intentions of “them.” Per Carla Ra’s recent article, I very much write solarpunk as if it were fantasy, and I get the feeling Weald does too. These little details make Pod North feel not only real, but somehow familiar. I feel like I could live there.
This is a perfect little exemplar of science fiction. It is a precisely-cut, perfect cameo of how modern literary science fiction works, breathes, and executes. If any of your friends ask “what is science fiction?” or, more precisely, “what is short science fiction?” then show them this story. Like it or don’t, they will understand.
The story is about Mary, last resident of Dusty Creek, AZ. Dusty Creek has been slowly clearing out because while cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque can buy weather machines, giving them tourist weather and perfect crop-growing seasons, the pent-up weather dumps on little places who can’t afford their own weather machines. Places like Dusty Creek.
Mary refuses to leave, either in the face of the common sense (which is neither) of the townspeople or the appeals of her Aunt Bea. Mary keeps thinking of her grandmother, the “tornado in size five boots,” what Gran would have done, how Gran would have responded, how Gran would have had the personality and the will to bring the town back from the dead. Gran had helped build this town.
Until Aunt Bea silently reminds her that Gran had come from somewhere else. Mary looks up from her furious, stubborn knitting to look on the photo of Gran and Aunt Bea in the refugee camp, over across the sea, from whence the two women had come to Dusty Creek. She looks down in her hands, at the ugly, too-tight stitches on the sock she’d started, and goes to join Aunt Bea on the road to Flagstaff and a new life.
What I love about this story is twofold. First is that it is a true science fiction story – the story would not work without the super-science of the weather machines wreaking havoc on the American Southwest. Second is that it is a true character story – the turning point of the story isn’t the flipping of a switch or the punching of the one Big Bad, it’s looking at a photograph and realizing the world was bigger than she thought it was. It’s the main character seeing the world differently.
The fact that the details of the photograph require us, the reader, to reevaluate Gran and Mary in the light of the new revelation of Gran’s refugee status is just icing on the cake.
I gave “Knitting Weather” seven rocket dragons when I read it, a rating I dole out maybe once a year. I’m keeping an eye out for Wendy Nikel both in Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. I can’t wait to see her next story.
You’ve all been wondering what I’ve been working on? Here it is, in glorious brights.
Out of the darkness of the present comes the light of the days ahead …
From all the good things provided by advanced AI to the innocence of discovering new worlds, join our authors as they present uplifting stories of science fiction and fantasy.
The list of names is pretty interesting, too:
Kevin David Anderson, Maureen Bowden, Steven D. Brewer, Nels Challinor, Regina Clarke, Stephen C. Curro, Jetse de Vries, Nestor Delfino, Gail Ann Gibbs, Henry Herz, Gwen C. Katz, Brandon Ketchum, Julia LaFond, R. Jean Mathieu, Cynthia McDonald, Christopher Muscato, Alfred Smith, A.M. Weald, David Wright
I’ve seen some of these names in the magazines, under titles of stories that snuck up on me six months later to remind me.
I hope my story, “Scars of Satyagraha,” will be one of those when you read it.
I forgot these sorts of stories ever existed, ever could exist.
Ken Liu needs no introduction – here is the man who translated and advocated for The Three-Body Problem, who showed us paper tigers and dandelion kings, the man who I jokingly referred to as the eight-foot tall invisible giant of Chinese-American science fiction. But the story, the story could use introducing. “Timekeepers’ Symphony” just debuted this September 1, in the pages and electrons of Clarkesworld. It takes just enough time (ha) to make its point, and leaves you to contemplate it for days after. It is the riveting story of…
No one.
There is no protagonist here, no character development that Dostoevsky would recognize. It is a description of approaches to time, on various of humanity’s colony worlds and back on Earth in Hawai’i. How some people live an entire lifetime in an afternoon, others over centuries with a deliberateness and gravity far beyond kings. The troubles of trying to import time from one locale to another. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s contributions to divisions of time. The elaborate timepieces, fast and slow, each world prizes as part of its identity, Earth included. And the harmonious whole of this cacophony, the cosmos underlying the chaos, Earth’s precisely-kept atomic second, the fundamental block of all human timekeeping, wherever in the cosmos it is.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
And you’ll walk away from it wondering at your watch, and wondering how to import time from your home to your workplace, since they so clearly operate on different clocks.
This is a question that came up a few times in the chatrooms and Zoom meetings of the Nebulas (which were fantastic, by the way, even if afflicted with Class-E lifeforms and even if I still don’t know how to make the laser bat stop lasering). Even the folks hip to the solarpunk jive weren’t too sure about solarpulp, so here’s some of my thoughts.
When I first started out, I described Doña Ana Lucía’s story as “solarpunk.” There have been a fewpeople who’ve tried to describesolarpunk, including me. But something was …different… about To the Future! as compared with 2312 or Sunvault. So I started calling it “solarpunk plus” and then, as the 30s/George Lucas influence became clearer, “two-fisted [tales of] solarpunk.” Finally, I realized what it really was: “solarpulp.”
solar…
…pulp
And I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d written it, either.
“6. Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution”
The Solarpunk Manifesto
Let’s imagine solarpulp as one of these little nests. There’s enough room and work to be done for everybody, I’d rather use my shovel to dig irrigation works than swing it at you. With that said, what then is solarpulp?
I wrote a story called “Fire Marengo” for a long-gone sailing magazine contest. It concerned Eli Shipley, able-bodied sailor, as he squares off against the twisted Sheikh of the Seas and two mad terrorists to rescue his friend Tchang and get out. This was in 2009, long before I or almost anyone else had ever heard of solarpunk, so it’s …different. The realistic wonder-tech is there in the form of the SS Sophie, a junk-rigged catamaran made of two former oil tankers. There’s the “astonishing unveiling of the new landscape” trope that’s the hallmark of solarpunk today, in the first sight of the Sheikh’s oil refinery-cum-palace. And casting a blonde, blue-eyed Welshman as the wicked Sheikh is punk as fuck, not to mention Eli’s destruction of his palace.
But it lacks the optimism of proper solarpunk: it’s a post-Peak Oil world where, as a friend said, “a fellow has to be clever to survive.” And Eli takes this in stride without question — he’s not book-smart, but he is a clever fellow when pushed up against the wall. And that’s the other thing that separated “Fire Marengo” from solarpunk.
It lacks restraint.
This isn’t a short story where the climax is two people talking around a table, or about one small victory against climate change, or a misunderstanding with high stakes. This isn’t a detailed study of psychological realism. This is an action story with larger-than-life characters duking it out and sneaking around and carrying on against a backdrop of punishing famine aboard the Sophie and gluttonous richesse in the Sheikh’s Palace as Japanese-made genejacks scuttle underfoot. Eli Shipley is a simple man of broad strokes, fighting like hell for shipmates and wishing he were ashore with one of them, a toke, a beer, and a big bowl of chili. He is a common man, a man of honor, he talks as a man of his age talks. And it is very much his story, a sailor’s yarn of a story, that he’s telling.
Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, in To the Future! and “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)” and her other adventures, does have the optimism of solarpunk. Almost moreso – she lives in what 99% of human history would call a utopia, where no one dies of hunger or exposure, no one remembers absolute poverty, lifespans reach 160 and the living is rich, and she’s studied enough history to know it. Her world still has a whiff of PROGRESS! to it, as if you’d gotten women the vote, banned the devil liquor, bought a car, and stock prices just kept rising. Safe enough to live in? You bet your bippy, mac.
And yet, her utopia banned war, but still suffers organized crime. The Crisis of Prithvi, where her father served humanity, was proof that humanity could still be monstrous and barbarous if pressed (and proof we can be noble and heroic if pressed, too). Their obsession with Earth and biology is near-pathological, and in the shadows, everyone plots to take the whole ball of wax or plots to take their ball and go home, come what may. Not to mention the lingering, life-support vestiges of colorism and bigotry.
It’s not too safe. Not too dull to be worth living in.
La Doña herself is a multisensory, simulflowing, highly-trained paragon of human accomplishment. She can climb up the bark of a tree or a crenelation of a havela while solving orbital mechanics in her head and keeping time by reciting San Juan de la Cruz. She is swordmistress, tango dancer, seductress, professor, adventuress, and noted scholar. She holds herself to an iron-clad set of standards, from as frivolous as her shade of lipstick or source of coffee to as profound as spending every Easter with her family or attacking only those who are armed and aware of her presence. She is best in her Six Worlds, and good enough for any world, certainly good enough for ours.
And she, too, is larger than life, large as Zorro, large as Doc Savage, large as Princess Aura and the Domino Lady.
I’ve been sitting on a quote here, that’s too long to include, but too important to leave out. This is the quote, bits of which I’ve kept in mind this entire time. This is a famous quote from Raymond Chandler, and some of you already know what it is just from the context.
Here it is, the heart of the article:
“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”
Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
This, I think, is what distinguishes solarpulp from solarpunk. Like solarpunk, we have a sustainable civilization (or at least notes toward one), optimism (even guarded optimism) as a claimed weapon, a “post-“ (capitalism, colonialism, cynicism) perspective, inclusivity*, and a desire to both imagine a future you’d want to live in, and get us halfway there.
Where we diverge is:
Solarpulp is about the story. It’s not about setting up themes or setting out technological ideas — though both are fun — it’s about telling a rip-roaring yarn that will make the audience cheer. Inspire them to go out and be the change you see in the world.
Solarpulp is about action. Solarpunk stories can be contemplations, but solarpulp needs to move, to struggle, to seek out, to accomplish, to adventure. There must be doing, or there is no pulp.
Solarpulp is about larger-than-life characters. The twin quotes are “he must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world,” and “if there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.” These are the people who inhabit solarpulp.
Solarpulp is about ideas in action. Doña Ana Lucía lives for historicity. Eli Shipley stands for shipmates, for crew. The Sheikh has lived with his monopoly so long, he’s forgotten how to fear. Doc Vikki lives the yankee Dream, it’s why she’s disturbingly sociopathic. They may or may not talk about them, but the larger-than-life characters are motivated by big ideas, and they struggle for those ideas against each other.
Alright, so that’s what solarpulp is. Where did it come from?
As it turns out, Planet.
If solarpunk can collectively point to 2312 as the seminal work or grandfather-piece, then solarpulp can certainly point to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Larger-than-life characters? Ask the druidic Lady Deirdre Skye or the twisted Sheng-ji Yang or aggrandizing Nwabudike Morgan. Action? If the other players don’t get you, the mindworm boils will. Ideas in action? The living embodiments of seven human philosophies duke it out on a hostile and strange alien world through building rival civilizations. About the story? Oddly enough for a Sid Meier game, yes, a thousand times yes. And if you haven’t played it, I won’t spoil it. It’s too …transcendent.
How about the optimism? Through human ingenuity (and maybe ecological harmony) you can alter the face, and fate, of Planet. Sustainable civilization? You don’t even have to play Deirdre to learn quickly the necessity, and means, of doing so. Inclusivity? The Mario faction is led by an Indian man, the militant rifle-thumpers by a Latina. Post- thinking? Separation from Earth has radically changed all the balances and now such forces are curtailed or contained, depending.
Ah, but does it have that one essential trope of solarpunk, that unveiling of the new landscape and the new reality it represents?
I reached back from Alpha Centauri’s starting point, to liberally strip both George Lucas and his inspirations in the pages of Dent and Republic reels of everything that wasn’t nailed down. I reached for Dune, of course. I reached forward to the post-Buffy, post-TV Tropes awareness of tropes and their manipulation, specifically reconstructing all those adventure tropes I love. I reached out toward my sailing experience and my time in China.
Solarpulp requires none of this, although “a story about everything I thought was cool when I was fourteen” isn’t a bad place to start. As long as you keep it noble and bright, having your “best in their world and good enough for any world” hero(ine) struggling for and with her ideas — always on the move, always in the thick of the action — against that sustainable, inclusive backdrop that left the old –isms far behind, you’ve got solarpulp.
And I want to read it.
*Indeed, one of the punk ways that I solarpulp is by taking folks underrepresented in the original pulps, like Latinas, working-class Jews, bisexuals, and Quebecois, and giving them starring or strong supporting roles as heroes and villains. Like Americana’s America, everyone has always been welcome here, especially if they weren’t.
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