“From the perspective of the early 21st century, things look pretty grim. A deadly cocktail of crises engulfs the people of planet Earth and all other forms of biotic life which share it: a geopolitical crisis, an economic crisis, and a worsening ecological crisis due to global warming, which stems from a political-economic system that requires fossil fuels to power its technostructure.

Culture, having as it does a symbiotic relationship with material conditions, reflects a lot of these crises in fiction and the arts. The 2000s and 2010s were replete with apocalyptic imagery of a future ravaged by war, totalitarianism, runaway weapons technology, killer viruses, zombies, and environmental collapse. Not that such narratives are unneeded. At best, they can serve as a wake-up call for those caught up in the myth that we had reached the “end of history” with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism on a planetary scale. But if they remain the primary vision our globalized culture has of the potential future, they can end up reproducing the pervasive cynicism and despair which makes all crises seem inescapable. 
This is why solarpunk is of value.” – Solarpunk Anarchists.

Solarpunk or 太阳朋克, (sun punk in Chinese) is a science fiction literary subgenre and art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, human impact on the environment, and addressing climate change and pollution. Especially as a subgenre, it is aligned with cyberpunk derivatives, and may borrow elements from utopian and fantasy genres.

As an art movement, solarpunk emerged in the 2010s as a reaction to the prevalence of bleak post-apocalyptic and dystopian media alongside an increased awareness of social injustices, impacts of climate change, and inextricable economic inequality. Solarpunk emerged as creators and their followers sought alternatives to consequential dystopic futures that were pragmatic and did not rely on mysterious “black box” technology. The genre became better defined through online communities that shared content and discussions on media platforms and dedicated websites. Solarpunk has been applied to a multitude of media such as literature, fine arts, architecture, fashion, music, tattoos, and video games. In literature, numerous previously published novels have been identified as being solarpunk, including Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Dispossessed, Ernest Callenbach‘s Ecotopia, Cory Doctorow‘s Walkaway, and numerous works by Kim Stanley Robinson. The first works written purposefully in the solarpunk genre were short stories collected in anthologies and later in novellas and novels, such as Becky Chambers‘s A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.

Contrasted to cyberpunk’s use of a dark aesthetic with characters marginalized or subsumed by technology in settings that illustrate artificial and domineering, constructed environments, solarpunk uses settings where technology enables humanity to sustainably co-exist with its environment alongside Art Nouveau-influenced aesthetics that convey feelings of cleanliness, abundance, and equability. Although solarpunk is concerned with technology, it also embraces low-tech ways of living sustainably such as gardening, permaculture, regenerative design,^[1] tool libraries, maker spaces, open-source, positive psychology, metacognition, and do-it-yourself ethics. Its themes may reflect on environmental philosophy such as bright green environmentalism, deep ecology, social ecology, and ecomodernism, as well as punk ideologies such as anarchism, anti-consumerism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, civil rights, commoning, and decentralization.