This post reproduces the text of the speech by Matteo Scarfò and Jessica Simmons on behalf of Solarpunk Italia, at the 2025 UERA Conference “Research alliances for climate-neutral, sustainable and equitable urban communities”, Rome 26th-28th February 2025
We are here today to represent the collective of activists and enthusiasts of art and literature who founded the website Solarpunk Italia. We express a complex and open, but clear, political vision: utopian, inclusive, anti-specist, ecologist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, feminist.
With our action, we interpret feelings and demands that call for collective, organic, fair, ecological, inclusive progress. The international Solarpunk movement was born spontaneously, “from below”, as a sustainable alternative to the current capitalist development model, responsible for the climate catastrophe, that threatens the very existence of civilization.
As the writer Rebecca Solnit said:
Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.[1]
Solarpunk Italia wants to be part of this revolt against language.
If there existed a Cartesian map of science fiction, the solarpunk movement would be at the opposite extreme of dystopia, whose great fortune we have witnessed in recent years: born from a noble rib of science fiction — the anti-utopia of Huxley, Orwell, Zamjatin — dystopia has turned into a genre in its own right, with its own aesthetics and audience. From speculation and warning against the distortions of civilisation, it has institutionalised itself into a self-referential and decadent genre. It feeds on the fruits of a gloomy aesthetic, a deteriorated human and social environment, a set of pessimistic premises (but ultimately consolatory, because the message it conveys is “if this world seems bad to you, the future could be worse”). Solarpunk literature, on the other hand, is characterised by a “vision from below”, not only a theoretical drive to invent creative nodes to cope with existence, but above all a desperate practical need, the need of the less wealthy classes to survive on a planet where those who have exhausted resources and poisoned the planet have eclipsed themselves to live in a world apart.
Revolt is a revenge of those excluded from a competitiveness that is to the detriment of the poorest; for solarpunk, solidarity is a strategic resource, and together with the abolition of profit it is a founding element of community relations.
Let us go to the roots of the solarpunk movement, to understand how it arose from a practical need, widespread and shared by people all over the world.
Twenty years ago, if someone had called a novel like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 ‘dystopian’, it would have provoked a storm of indignant comments. To show how the meanings of words and ideas change: ‘dystopias’, ‘anti-utopias’ or ‘negative once denoted those works written by authors who were extraneous to the science fiction literary genre — authors who nevertheless knew their stereotypes and themes well, and knew how to bend them to their needs, without falling into the clichés of the genre.
The ‘classic’ dystopias prefigured a terrifying future, starting from the symptoms present in the political reality of the century: fascism and its worst incarnation, National Socialism; the horror of Stalinism and its attempt to rewrite history; totalitarianism and the degenerations of an out-of-control science: i.e, works such as Zamjatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwells Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Four, the triad of exemplary anti-utopias to which were added a few other titles, all one step further down the ladder of notoriety.
The perception of dystopia began to change at the beginning of our 21st century, according to the pattern:
Role-playing games => young adult => neo-dystopian => science fiction
This evolution began in 1999 with Takami Kōshun’s Battle royale and came to fruition in 2008 with Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, and the great success of the latter’s film adaptation with young audiences.
The aesthetics of role-playing games thus merged with the dystopian setting, and created a genre, or sub-genre, the ‘neo-Dystopian’. What remains of the anti-utopia? The warning about the future becomes a mere setting backdrop, social criticism turns into generic libertarianism, political denunciation gives way to adventure. Simply put, neo-Dystopianism can be summed up as ‘if-it-moves-shoot-it videogames meet US-made individualism’.
Even the post-apocalyptic sub-genre of science fiction has converged into the neo-dystopian, to the point that some readers cannot even discriminate between dystopia (i.e. an oppressive future society) and social collapse due to a natural catastrophe (e.g. a meteorite collision, a devastating pandemic or rising sea levels).
The post-apocalyptic sub-genre, dominated by Anglo-Saxon authors, depicts the dissolution, following a trauma on a planetary level, of social ties, replaced by the “all against all” that is the modern version of the homo homini lupus brought to the fore in the 17th century by Thomas Hobbes: for the great English philosopher, human nature is selfish, dominated by the survival instinct; a pessimistic conception of the state of nature whereby if there is no longer any law, the human being is ready to harm his fellow human beings, to eliminate anyone who stands in the way of satisfying his own needs.
This literary premise of the post-apocalyptic is, however, contrary to any empirical observation. We read again in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise in Hell that catastrophes produce extraordinary temporary communities, havens among the rubble of civilisation, where people support each other, without any higher authority.
This is not naive utopia, but rather observation of cases that have occurred in practice: we have known since Aristotle’s time that homo sapiens is a social animal, that feels fulfilled through his relationship with his fellow humans.
The neo-Dystopian state of war all-against-all is a literary construct, an integral part of the language that conceals the brutality of climate catastrophe.
Underlying the neo-dystopian, we have said, is a basic, scientifically unproven postulate that can be summarised as: ‘the collapse of capitalist society entails the dissolution of social bonds’. This has become a sine qua non assumption that has passed directly from the post-apocalyptic into the neo-dystopian.
Writers and readers who rebel against this limited and mystifying diktat usually quote a striking phrase by the American literary critic Fredric Jameson: ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, which indicates how for Anglophone science fiction authors the traumatic dissolution of liberalist-capitalist society entails the end of civilisation, and by extension the end of the world.
Jameson’s sentence, taken from The seeds of time, actually expresses a more complex thought:
It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.
It is significant that Jameson did not explicitly speak of the ‘end of the world’, which is a messianic or metaphysical definition, but of the ‘thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature’. In fact, the self-destruction of the human race will mean fewer problems for the planet than the extinction of the dinosaurs.
This explicit reference to nature is accompanied by a reference to the ‘weakness in our imagination’, which in turn refers us to the title of this talk, taken from a phrase by Argentine writer and journalist Osvaldo Soriano: ‘The ruling classes hate dreams because they are incapable of generating a poetics of the future.’
The neo-dystopian genre is a child of this inability to imagine; the prevailing ‘dystopisation of the imaginary’ is functional to justify the theory of a lack of alternatives to capitalism — Margaret Thatcher’s T.I.N.A., There is no alternative [to capitalism]. Capitalism would not only be the best system of government, but the only one possible.
Neo-Dystopianism appeals especially to young readers, who have never known any alternative to the free market system; the only future without liberal capitalism they can imagine is a post-apocalyptic scenario. Capitalism even monopolises the ways in which we imagine out tomorrows.
One of the most typical representatives of the current global political-economic system, tycoon Elon Musk, seems to embody the prototype of the neo-dystopian hero. It seems like a twist of fate that space exploration has passed from Kennedy’s New Frontier to Musk’s SpaceX, whose philosophy can be summed up as ‘we will have to abandon the Earth that we have ravaged to the point of making it uninhabitable for mankind, in order to colonise other planets’.
Instead, the preservation of life on our wonderful planet is one of the foundations of solarpunk, which cares not only about the existence of mankind, but also about natural biodiversity and diverse human cultures.
Underlying the neo-dystopian narrative is a Manichean conflict of disarming banality: individual versus state, freedom versus equality, identity versus differentiation. These conflicts convey tendentious messages: there is no advanced technology without centralised control, there is no equality without totalitarianism, there is no scientific progress that does not feed power. Neo-dystopianism propagates distrust of the state, equality and science, in the name of the individual and a misunderstood freedom.
Dystopia has lost its ability to warn of a negative future; it has nowadays a playful motivation that allows it not only to be metabolised by the public, but also to be marketed by capitalism as a commodity to be consumed.
As a reaction to this degeneration, the solarpunk movement has been developing since fifteen years ago, simultaneously and without a single direction, in several parts of the world of non-English-speaking culture: an anthology of short stories from Brazil; a new aesthetic of illustration that contaminates Art Nouveau and Afrofuturism; sustainable architecture projects; the birth of groups on the social networks Reddit, FaceBook, Discord, etc.; activism in fields as diverse as aesthetics, music, cooperation, DIY, ecological restoration, engineering, gardening, bio-architecture, green design, green energy, materials science, permaculture, repair cafés, solar energy, sustainability, tree planting, urban planning, volunteering, 3D printing etc.
As far as literature is concerned, the desire for renewal meets two needs:
- less gloomy stories, in which pessimism is functional to the plot, and not its main character;
- stories that are capable of imagining a future, and operational strategies to make it possible.
So what is solarpunk? Just a new subgenre of science fiction, a fashionable label? Solarpunk is in the making, like the world to which it seeks to reconnect us. We take note of the inevitable change to come, and entrust to the flow of history these words of ours, which will soon be outdated, and perhaps need to be rewritten. We accept this, and leave the definitions not as dogma, but as testimony.
Solarpunk is both a literary genre and an aesthetic. It is also a movement: it imagines a better future and builds operational strategies to make it possible; it acts as an interpreter of feelings and demands for collective, organic, fair, ecological, inclusive progress.
From its very beginnings, it expresses a complex and open but clear political vision. Starting from its name, the reference to alternative energy sources is evident.
Solar-: the sun is the primary source of energy, the symbol of life; it is the alternative energy to fossil fuels; it is the utopia that cultivates hope; solar is daylight, contrasting with the rainy post-urban scenarios of the neo-dystopian.
-Punk: the legitimate rebellion against the existing system of things, the rejection of the unsustainable, predatory, lethal model of capitalist development, in blatant contrast to life and vitality, not only human; the utopian spark capable of generating a better world, as opposed to the dystopian narrative that no longer gives us useful tools to react and slides into conservatism or trendy extinctionism; a tool to unhinge the oppositions that are throwing us into the abyss: wealth-poverty, man-woman, humans-others, colonialism-migrations, extractivism-conservationism, etc.
Some of the themes that potentially make solarpunk the new utopia of the 21st century are environmentalism, degrowth, sustainability, forms of social organisation based on sharing and local rather than state scale, nanotechnology as a new way of understanding and using scientific progress.
Solarpunk does not preach an anachronistic ‘return to nature’, but pursues a conscious progress, in which science and technology, used in a transparent and democratic manner, allow us to finally achieve a balance with the planet and the life that inhabits it. Added to this is an equally radical inclusiveness, the child of our times and the important uprising movements of recent years: anti-racism and rejection of patriarchy are the basis for an all-round inclusiveness. Towards people (thanks to feminist, LGBTQIA*, anti-abylist instances), towards all creatures, towards the world, with the refusal to ontologically separate the human being from his ecosystem.
For solarpunk literature, utopia is a clear reference, as is climate fiction. The solarpunk manifestos published by writers, activists and communities around the world are programmatic documents in which environmentalism is juxtaposed with communitarian anarchism, socialism, rebellion and guerrilla art. These Manifestos express the desire for a radical rethinking of the relationship between human beings and nature: the organic vision of solarpunk relates directly to Margulis and Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, and to ecofiction from the 1970s onwards.
* * *
This is the Manifesto of Solarpunk Italia
- We believe that solarpunk is an ongoing process, not a closed phenomenon.
- Our key word, writing solarpunk and writing about solarpunk, is hope.
- Solarpunk is a new utopia on two levels, that prefers hope to optimism.
- Hope is between the lines: hope for a better future and the concrete possibility of building it.
- And the hope is outside the lines: solarpunk wants to happen and longs to be heard.
- Solarpunk wants a better future to exist.
- In the shared space of the Solarpunk Italia site we talk about what we write and what we would like to write. We write about what we read and what we would like to read.
- There is only one way to both share and disprove our vision of solarpunk: write more and more.
* * *
Let us now look at some subject outlines for solarpunk narratives, in the knowledge that one of the main objections of potential readers is an alleged ‘absence of conflict’ in utopian narratives. This is a misunderstanding of the concept of ‘narrative conflict’: this expression does not necessarily refer to a strong, dramatic opposition, as the word ‘conflict’ might lead one to think, between good/bad characters.
Narrative conflict is a matter of dialectics between two different wills in the plot, which is only resolved in the finale of the story. There is also conflict in a romantic story, for instance.
- A small human community (an apartment block, a neighbourhood, a work unit, etc.) is confronted with a problem that could evolve into a serious hazard; two different solution possibilities are compared, one more traditional but ‘expensive’ in energy terms, the other innovative and sustainable, but more complex and challenging.
- The protagonists accidentally discover a conspiracy / a speculation / an impending event / a flaw in a system, which threatens to disrupt their lives; they mobilise themselves by makeshift means to prevent it, and succeed through mutual solidarity.
- A group of characters becomes isolated due to an event (flood / accident in space / accident in a desert area etc.), and only have makeshift means at their disposal in the environment, hence pre-digital technology.
- A team engaged in environmental protection work / scientific study / archaeological research etc. is confronted with a problem that threatens to cause an extinction / cancellation / destruction of the activity or object of study; the protagonists will have to force protocols or the aid of artificial intelligence to avoid it.
- A group of people that survived a serious threat of extinction have to deal with their lives with analogue procedures, to which they are no longer accustomed by mentality; they succeed by resorting to ancient practices of repair / recovery / creative reuse of materials at their disposal.
Of course, these hypotheses of narrative conflict, which are only a limited example of case histories, can intertwine with other subplots of personal rivalry, love stories, tragedies and so on.
* * *
In conclusion, we would like to overturn one of the main preconceptions of science fiction, namely that its value lies in predicting the future. We know that many inventions, technologies and events have been foreseen by authors from the more or less distant past; however, this is an intrinsic feature of science fiction, not its function. For every successful invention, there are a hundred that have not come true, nor will they ever come true.
The ruling classes hate dreams because they are incapable of generating a poetics of the future. Solarpunk does not want to predict the future: it wants to change it.
Notes
[i] The Guardian, April 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-change-violence-occupy-earth
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