Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales

by Phoebe Wagner (Editor), Cory Doctorow, Brent Lambert

Overview

Featuring stories by Cory Doctorow, Brent Lambert, Cynthia Zhang, Kevin Wabaunsee, Izzy Wasserstein, Jeremy Szal, and more!

Cyberpunk and solarpunk are, in many ways, two parts of the same story. Cyberpunk is all about people surviving and fighting back in high-tech, low-life dystopias. Solarpunk is a more utopian subgenre of cyberpunk that tells stories of communities surviving, adapting to, and solving the climate crisis in decidedly post-dystopian worlds.

But the foundational aspect shared by both genres is people and communities fighting for a better future. The context around that struggle may be different from one genre to the next, but the fight-the struggle-is one and the same.

In this way, cyberpunk and solarpunk are sibling genres, and we feel like it couldn't make any more sense to pair the two into a single short story anthology.

The anthology has three kinds of stories. There are cyberpunk stories, solarpunk stories, and stories that straddle the line and bring the two genres together in one narrative. In addition, the anthology comes with a companion TRPG game in which readers and their friends collective create their own cyberpunk-solarpunk universe and fight for a better future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781958121313
Publisher:	Android Press
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.57(d)

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2023

Wagner (When We Hold Each Other Up) places utopian and dystopian futures in dialogue through this thoughtful if slightly uneven collection of 15 original stories, arranged to showcase how the optimistic, post-climate collapse solarpunk aesthetic is conceptually descended from the urban violence of cyberpunk. Wagner opens with five gimmicky cyberpunk tales, including Brent Lambert’s “Nano-Vibration,” which takes readers to a gritty rave, and Ai Jiang’s “Property of PAUSE Ltd,” which explores corporate slavery. The five subsequent “transitional” stories are more complex; Lauren C. Teffeau’s “Root Cause” depicts freedom fighters who are impatient with the pace of “agro-tek” rebuilding, while Kevin Wabuansee’s “Broken Threads” imagines cli-fi solutions that straddle the high-tech and the mystical. The final five solarpunk shorts, the strongest of the bunch, emphasize problem-solving in a world of limited resources, and demonstrate the aesthetic’s versatility, from the humor of J.D. Harlock’s “Solarpunks,” in which teens raised in a utopia find it hard to indulge in rebellious urges, to the wonder and beauty of Ana Sun’s “The Scent of Green.” Wagner ably achieves their goal of surveying the evolution of a genre, but cyberpunk fans may feel shortchanged by the relative weakness of that section. Readers coming to this for the solarpunk stories, however, will be well pleased. (July)

Publishers Weekly