Hi Boundlings and welcome to Solarpunk Futures! I’ve been so excited for this quest to go live! It has been a true labor of love trying to select the best 15 books to introduce the solarpunk genre.

What is Solarpunk? Because solarpunk is so new, there is not a great single definition of what it is and is not. I think Sarena Ulibarri in her intro to Solarpunk Summers captures this emergent nature of the genre so I am just going to quote her here: “A lot of the tropes and requirements of solarpunk are still being negotiated, among both the writers and artists producing solarpunk works and the bloggers and critics discussing it. Does it have to explicitly deal with energy technology? Does it have to be anti- or post-capitalist? Does it have to be utopian? Does it even have to be science fiction?…I settled on a couple of requirements: stories had to touch on environmental issues and/or climate change, and they had to have an overall optimistic tone.” I used a similar framing while selecting the books in this quest. My definition of solarpunk is that it is a genre that fundamentally envisions and works toward a better future. It is imaginative, joyful, community and justice oriented, and emphasizes living in harmony with our world. But optimism doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. The characters in these stories grapple with real problems in an imperfect world. Solarpunk isn’t content with simply imagining a utopia, it asks: a Utopia for whom? and how does that world get built?

Guide to the Quest The classics: Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin and Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson are 2 solarpunk books written by 2 of the parents of the genre. You can’t talk about solarpunk without reading KSR or Le Guin. Almost all of their books could be considered solarpunk but I selected these 2 as standalones that I feel best represent the genre. And in the case of Le Guin, Always Coming Home is less widely read than some of her other works.

Indigenous Voices: It was really important to me that this collection included stories written by Indigenous authors. So much of solarpunk builds on ideas of community and frameworks for living in balance with the Earth that were created and practiced by Indigenous communities. In this side quest, you can find, Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead and The Peace Keeper by BL Blanchard.

Short story collections: Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers edited by Serena Ulibarri, and Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead. In my research, I found that most of the innovation in solarpunk seems to be happening in short stories, and these 2 collections are great places to start.

Novellas: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern, Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri and A Pslam for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. Pslam is maybe one of the most beloved solarpunk stories published to date. If you have no experience with solarpunk, I recommend you start here. Binti and Depart, Depart! also deal with unique questions of identity in the genre.

Full length novels: Too Like Lightening by Ada Palmer, Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell, The Peace Keeper by BL Blanchard, A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins, Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer, and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. These novels offer you a wide range of solarpunk narratives to dig deeper. From cozy sci-fi, to climate disaster, to societal collapse, to dramas in space, and utopias that are more than they seem - the world of solarpunk is expansive and ever growing!

Further Reading Like I said, it was difficult to narrow the list down to just 15 book and as a result there are lots of great solarpunk books that didn’t make the cut. I have a list linked here 🔗 for further reading that I update with new releases. While this side quest is maxed out at 15 books, recommendations in this forum are always welcome!

Happy reading 😎