Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales

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)