Reviews

Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation by Brontë Christopher Wieland, Phoebe Wagner

rbmaths's review against another edition

funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

This is a really solid collection of art, poetry, and short fiction. 

finsternuss's review against another edition

adventurous challenging hopeful reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

centralia's review against another edition

3.0

 This book was short on solar and even shorter on punk.

I think the stories in this book leaned more on the side of eco-speculation than they did solarpunk. Unfortunately, the majority of these stories could not imagine an egalitarian future. A few of these stories don't take place on Earth because it's uninhabitable, and I find that to be a comman scifi- especially space opera- trope yet not a particularly solarpunk one. Others just took place in a bleak climate apocalypse future with little actual solarpunk themes. Still others would have particularly distasteful ideas that I'll mention specifically later in the review.

The following does not contain active spoilers, but if you want to go in completely blind, then you can ignore this:

Even my favorites in this collection left something to be desired: The Boston Hearth Project was great, but the plot centers around radicals and homeless people occupying an advanced climate controlled building built for and funded by elites in a hypercapitalist future using futuristic augmented reality tech. Very punk and yet it's also textbook cyberpunk. My other favorites were Speechless Love, Boltzmann Brain, and The Herbalist. The latter were not only nice stories, but they also completed the assignment. Somewhat. I'm being generous. I found all of the illustrations and poetry to be great additions too. (Okay, the Israel poem threw me for a loop, but I think they were referring more to the nebulous holy/home land that forms a large part of religious Jewish life and not the actively settler colonial state. I couldn't find much info on the author, but the poem isn't a favorable introduction. Strandbeest Dreams goes hard though.) I thought it was neat that two afrofuturist stories were included but neither worked for me exactly. The rest I either felt neutral towards or actively disliked.
There was Pop and the CFT, the story that imagines a future where people are taxed according to their climate footprint (a tool that was invented by an oil company. Shell, I believe?), which effectively punishes and exploits the working class character(s) without problematizing the material conditions that force most people to make decisions that damage the planet yet fund large companies. There was none of that nuance in this story, just the idea of a harmful tax and some song references.
There's Last Chance, the story with the horribly unethical gerontocracy that isolates and indoctrinates its youth into believing their planet is already apocalyptic to compel them not to damage it. As though people are inherently inclined to environmentally destructive behavior, and this is the most effective way to prevent that? Insufferable main character too.
Speaking of insufferable main characters, there's The Trees Between, a particularly infuriating story where a very obstinate woman is so attached to her alternate reality tech, she actively sacrifices people to climate change induced fires for no real reason other than to use her tech for a purpose it wasn't equipped for in the first place. No sense of community, rather a sense of new technology will save us from climate change!
There was Solar Child, the story where a child was bought by a millionaire CEO because they were some kind of "green" human, and the org that made them just needed funding? And that was the gist of the story. It really just ended there, and as the reader, I have no idea what this was doing in a solarpunk anthology or what the author intended. It sounded superficially like environmental scifi though what with its terrarium labs, solarsaurs, and photosapiens. Here's a quote from that particular story, "The human race does not need revolution. We have tried that so many times, and here we are. No, what we need is a new way of living with ourselves. A way to adapt to the world we have created. We need to evolve. And evolution takes love." Honestly, why was this published in a solarpunk anthology? Like...shut the fuck up? That wasn't the only story with the central idea that humans just needed to evolve to improve their lives. 
The Death of Pax had similar evolution themes, and I hated it there too. The main character just straight up chooses to non-consensually transmit an alien worm from an alien sentience to the entirety of humanity for the sake of evolving humans to the point where said sentient aliens would feel better about creating contracts with them so they can be "symbionts." So it was mostly terrible. This particular worm was also untested before, but our main character did say that they were one of about seventeen people to survive the prototype soooo it's probably fine to ship that off to Earth.
I also hated The Reset (by Jaymee Goh :'0. I had high hopes after New Suns) which really felt like a waste of time. It explored the idea of reversing time by thirty years as if that would be good for literally anything. Some blame was placed on overpopulation, which is more myth than anything, and  it entertained the idea that things would play out differently if people knew about severe climate change in advance. As if scientists and oil companies haven't known about it for what? around 7 decades now, and material conditions don't exist, and it's just a matter of will to stop climate change or something?

Most of these stories just were not what I tend to look for in my solarpunk. If I wanted more visions of hierarchical societies, expensive technology, or barely habitable environmental collapse, I would just read the news or something. If you're really invested in solarpunk you could give this a read, but there really is better solarpunk media out there.

clare_cedar's review against another edition

adventurous hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.0

catsnflags's review against another edition

emotional inspiring reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

meganium's review against another edition

challenging inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

cbarsotti's review against another edition

4.0

A great collection of stories that cover a wide spectrum of ideas of solarpunk. Some are very contemporary and deal in current societal issues while some stories offer an otherworldly experience of transhuman inspiration.

Favorites: The Death of Pax, The Reset, Solar Child

catcherinthepi's review against another edition

reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

2.5

This was an incredibly frustrating read. As someone who strongly advocates for the power of speculative fiction to shape how we approach problems in real life, this was a let-down: solarpunk is supposed to be a hopeful perspective on how to confront the climate crisis, and this anthology simply didn't follow its own definition of solarpunk! Admittedly, this is one of the earlier, still accessible collections of solarpunk written work, but my goodness, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel here. 

It's important to pay attention to the subtitle: "Stories of solarpunk and eco-speculation". Tbh this collection is more of the latter: how would humans terraform other planets? How would humans interact with sentient beings in symbiotic ways? While these are interesting questions, they are not solarpunk. Moreover, a LOT of these stories take place in post-apocalyptic settings...my understanding was that solarpunk stories 1) focus on science fiction futures on Earth, and 2) in part or full evade a total climate collapse, and 3) ultimately have a hopeful tone. A lot of these stories have at most one of those three criteria.

Also...the writing is so heavy-handed and bad in so many of these stories. I can't say I could do much better, but...finesse was not the strong suit of this collection. There were several stories I simply did not finish because the writing was so bad. 

I did enjoy some of the stories/poems that weren't totally solarpunk: "A catalog of sunlight at the end of the world" by A.C. Wise, "Speechless love" by Yilun Fan, "The death of Pax" by Santiago Belluco, "Pop and the CFT" by Brandon Crilly

Stories/poems I found were actually solarpunk and that I liked: "Solar child" by Camille Meyers, "Strandbeest Dreams" by Lisa M Bradley and Jose M Jimenez, "The Reset" by Jaymee Goh

alliepeduto's review against another edition

3.0

So this was interesting on a whole. I love the idea of solarpunk, and the mostly more hopeful approach to dystopias brought on by climate change. Out of all of them, Last Chance was my favorite, followed closely by Solar Child. If I were to sit down and exam that, I probably liked those best because they dealt with kids, and I think on a whole the future of our environment is in balance for the next generation, and I like the idea of humanity persevering despite climate tragedies. I liked the concept of Pop and the CFT, and Speechless Love was also really interesting, though kind of sad. And of course, A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World was the grand finale, a well placed and touching story to end the anthology. Overall I enjoyed it, and I look forward to the genre’s development.

profirebug's review against another edition

dark sad slow-paced

I didn't finish this book. The first several stories were so disappointing that I couldn't bring myself to slog through any more. The editors who put this together have absolutely no idea what solarpunk is supposed to be about.

The following is a quick summary of each story's plot and my problems with it. 

The Boston Hearth Project
Some techies take over a fancy new building intended for rich people and put it to better use. Reads like the environmental themes were written in after the fact to make it eligible for this collection. Does not feel politically or practically feasible. Punk, but stupid, and not the solar kind. 

Speechless Love
This is a decent story. There is zero environmentalism. The surface of the earth became uninhabitable because global warming caused tectonic instability (yes, really) and so everyone lives in floating pods in the atmosphere. They still dump their garbage on Earth. There is no talk of trying to reclaim it someday. At best this is a cautionary tale. Not solarpunk. 

Teratology
Set at a research station doing monitoring of fish populations. Another cautionary tale of a heavily damaged world. I especially enjoyed the tidbit that "[if] a fish meets oxygen, it chokes to death." A+ scientific understanding of the world and the other life we share it with. Not solarpunk. 

Eight Cities
A plotless vignette set in a post-technological-collapse India. Ok, not solarpunk. 

Dust
An asteroid turns out to be sentient, much to the consternation of some asteroid miners. In a generic sci-fi collection it would have been good. Again, there are zero environmental themes relating to Earth. Not solarpunk.