Hello world, I'm Tom Sino. In this series I'd like to introduce you to Solar Punk. Talk a bit about what it is and why you should care. And then power you with a series of writing prompts so you can lend your voice to the movement and shape it. Today I'm going to start with a brief introduction of Solar Punk. Talk a bit about why I'm creating this series and the brilliant people behind the prompts I'm sharing. In the rest of the series we'll look at one prompt at a time and discuss how it fits into the Solar Punk genre. Share some real world inspirations for the prompt and some themes to consider. So let's dive right in. The term Solar Punk may be new to some of you and for many more to probably evoke images but maybe not an explanation you can put into words. If we pull the definition right from Wikipedia, Solar Punk is a literary, artistic and activist movement that invisions and works towards actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. That's a lot for a single movement to be doing. Literary, artistic and activist movement. Let me break it down for you another way. Solar Punk borrows from the vibrant aesthetic ideas of genres like Cyberpunk and Steam Punk but imagines what they would look like in a world that's grown past capitalism and found some level of harmony with our environment and within our communities. Now I should pause here and clarify that it's not to say that Solar Punk envisions the world free of commerce per se, though some artists and authors may go that route. Solar Punk is very clearly trying to imagine an end to the global capitalist system and one that is succeeding. You see, Solar Punk is generally a more optimistic vision of the future than we encounter with Cyberpunk and dystopian futurism. Solar Punk grew from our fears and anxieties of a technological age progressing faster than any in history. Solar Punk, conversely, tries to see past the ends or over the hills of those bad times in our present and near future to a place where we come together and begin to heal. Now I'm talking about it aesthetically here, but remember this is a literary, artistic and activist movement. The important of aesthetics is fairly intuitive for the art and somewhat for the literature as well. But what about activism? Well, it turns out it's more important than you might think. It's incredibly difficult to try and reshape the world into this new optimistic vision of the future if the people don't have a clear idea of what that could possibly look like. We need the pictures and we need the stories to help us imagine. To give you a metaphor to play with, we needed Star Trek to show us a communicator before engineers thought to build a cell phone. And that brings us to this series itself. I was inspired to make these recordings by a talk from Pavo Nage. He gave this talk to our local hackerspace here in Reykjavík, but you can also find the recording from when he gave it at Hope 2020. I'll include a link in the notes. The talk is titled Technological Narratives and I can't recommend it enough. In about 50 minutes he does a marvelous job illustrating the limitations of imagination within our popular genres, the real tangible need for the creation of more fiction and art. In his presentation he told us, we haven't yet created the great solar punk novel. A work we can point to and say that is solar punk. And that's why I'm here. And hopefully while you'll join me in this series. Without clear examples to point to, the budding genre is at risk of being co-opted by interest which are directly counter to the movement's goals. A recent article by Queen Desk referred to solar punk as a reactionary web 3 movement against libertarian bitcoin. And Chibani, the Greek yogurt company recently embraced solar punk in one of their ads in a wonderfully yeebly-esque animated style. It's really good obviously. I can't even hate on it. But we'll continue to see more of this until the movement matures with enough significant works to anchor it in people's minds. We need more stories. But not just anything. We need stories that capture the full vision of the movement. That means the activism too, the punk in solar punk, the politics and struggle to see that future happen. Thankfully, we have some guidance. Although and his colleagues worked for several months to put together a list of writing prompts that tackle this very idea. And his introduction to the writing prompts, he says, all the prompts are set in the years 2030 to 40 with no technologies or scientific advances beyond what we currently have. They explore multiple categories of problems, cultural, economical, infrastructural, and political. Each of the groups consists of a gallery of colorful and varied people whose goals will often clash with each other, even if they all mean well. I think this is what's the most important in solar punk, a community. And that's what I want to leave you with today. When I asked him and others in the solar punk community to give me a few guidelines for what makes a story solar punk, it boiled down to three things. Number one, community as protagonist. Solar punk stories may be from any point of view, but they are not inherently heroes journeys. A major protagonist should be the community itself. Conversely, they should avoid tropes like the chosen one. A superhero isn't what gets us to the brighter future. Technology to save us doesn't happen in a montage alone in a basement. It happens through teams of people, engineers, artists, teachers, testers, trials, and failures, and ultimately compromised. Number two, infrastructure is sexy. It may not be literal infrastructure, but means and manners by which the community functions is a major part of that aesthetic. In a science fiction story, you talk about the science. In a solar punk story, talk about the windmill or the river travel or the way parkways were converted into a market. Make it memorable, make it sexy. And remember, there are no simple solutions. This infrastructure came at a cost and through hard work and may still be a struggle to keep it going. And number three, the human environmental context. Because we're creating stories of an optimistic future, it doesn't mean we're without conflict. There's probably plenty of interpersonal conflict both within and without the community. What's in harmony, at least for the protagonist community, is the relationship between the humans and their environment. And with all guidelines like these, these are here to steer you in the right direction. They're not hard and fast rules. Okay, thanks for sticking with me to the end. I really hope I've picked your interest in solar punk and that you'll join me as we explore the prompts in this series. Music in this recording is float-out how we found it from Global Patterns compilation, solar punk, a brighter perspective.