After 4 years working away to produce fortnightly posts we’re celebrating our 100th SolarPunk Stories Substack!
To mark the occasion we’re sharing a selection of some of our favourites with you below. We especially hope that the thousands of new readers who have joined us over the past couple of years will find some of the older gems delightful.
The best place to start is by describing what solarpunk is and why it matters. We recently updated our main introductory piece about this What is solarpunk, one vision or many worlds?.
You might also enjoy Protopia or utopia? Which is more solarpunk? and Is ruin porn solarpunk?
One thing that sets solarpunk apart from other genres is that it comes with a community for change. Two of our favourite pieces highlighting the broader solarpunk tribe are Black solarpunks celebration and Solarpunk school is in session. The second of these was about the launch of the London School of Solarpunk just over a year ago. Since then they’ve put on a whole host of awesome IRL events from their base in Tottenham. You can find out more about them here.
One of the most important things about solarpunk is it can inspire people to take action to make a deliciously sustainable world a reality.
To that end we recommend reading Solarpunks of the world unite which is about the role of the international trade union movement in helping ensure a just transition to a greener, fairer future. Another good one is Solarpunks for a 3 day weekend from 2022 which encouraged supporting the 4 day week campaign. Since then they have gone from strength to strength in the UK and there is also a sister campaign in the U.S.
If you’re looking for a way in to solarpunk fiction the Solarpunk starter reading list has five texts to help get you going with our genre. For a taste of something we made ourselves, there’s a free extract from Solarpunk Detective #1. We’ve got more of these thrilling tales from better futures drafted and are looking for help to get them published. More on that in an upcoming post.
On the small screen the show we have done the most to champion is Moonhaven. In spite of its lunar title, we feel this is The most solarpunk TV show you’ve never seen and it’s now on Netlfix. Check our post for why you should watch, re-watch and share this awesome series as much as possible. Is Scavenger’s Reign solarpunk? was our exploration of another breathtakingly brilliant TV series.
We’ve done 6 solarpunk movie reviews so far. The one that received the most engagement from lovely readers like you, was an attempt by Disney at our genre that flopped so hard we called the post Solarpunk disaster? We explored if its failure means our genre is doomed to remain niche?
Help us champion solarpunk by taking out a paid subscription to this newsletter. It costs less than the price of a coffee a month and means a huge amount to us.
As a paid subscriber you will get a free copy of SolarPunk Detective #1 and other bonuses as well as a warm, fuzzy feeling inside knowing you are helping bring a deliciously sustainable world closer to reality.
Support solarpunk by upgrading to paid
Solarpunk videogames galore is a roundup of ways you can interact with building a deliciously sustainable future through play. This post included an AR game, by our solarpunk sister Kalpana Arias, that aims to help make grey spaces green in reality.
Then we had an exclusive chat with the creator of Future? No Thanks! which is A Solarpunk videogame laughing its way towards a better tomorrow. This is basically a protopian manifesto disguised as a laugh-out-loud sandbox adventure game.
Finally there’s Starship solarpunk, an interview with the creators of Generation Exile. We discovered this city-building game set among the stars acts as an ‘immersive metaphor’ for how we might solarpunk spaceship Earth.
These are just a small sample of the 100 Substacks we’ve done so far. In the archive we’ve got gems about solarpunk music, art, travel,comic books, weirdness, sharing gardens, tree towers, surveys and so much more. Browse at your leisure here.
Which of our Substacks have you most enjoyed over the years? Is it one that we’ve chosen to highlight here or one we missed from this round-up?
What type of stuff would you like to see more of for our next century of posts? Let us know in the comments below.
The main way this newsletter grows is people like you sharing it. Let’s bring a deliciously sustainable future a little closer by passing this onto anyone you think might enjoy a dose of inspiration.
See you in the sunshine,
Alex Holland
Founder, SolarPunk Stories
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