Today on the blog, award-winning sci-fi author RB Kelly argues that in a world that feels like it's on the brink of disaster, telling and reading tales of hope is an act that is, I dare say, a wee bit rebellious.
Weaving Threads of Hope
I’m a dystopian sci-fi author. At least, that’s what they tell me. I’ve always resisted the term because, to me, the dystopia of my novels Edge of Heaven and On the Brink is less “dramatic societal collapse” and more “frog in a pot of slowly boiling water.” My novels are dystopian in the way that our current society might be dystopian to somebody living one hundred years ago. Plenty of things are objectively better for humanity — but plenty of things are also objectively worse.
These are the futures that I can see us sleepwalking into, and that’s why I write them: because I feel like, on balance, we’d be better off avoiding them. But I’d like to think that there’s a little spark of hope in my dystopian landscapes, because I have faith in humanity (yes, even now). I believe we’ll eventually get it right.
I think that’s why I’m drawn to solarpunk — though I am slightly alarmed that, in today’s sci-fi, the most anarchic literary act is to tell stories in which we don’t wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth.
The essence of solarpunk
Solarpunk embodies a philosophy that emphasises community, sustainability, and harmony with nature. It imagines a world where humanity has forged new paths toward ecological balance and social equity. In this optimistic narrative landscape, characters collaborate to create resilient communities that thrive amidst our new, self-imposed challenges, and emerge stronger and aligned with our planet, rather than being crushed by our mistakes.
I write dystopian futures because I’m worried that we’re not taking our dystopian present seriously enough. I’m drawn to solarpunk futures because I’d like to think that there’s a second chance for us on the other side of where we’re headed. Both of these ideas feed into my short story, “A Place To Belong,” which imagines a society pulled back from the very brink of destruction by technology — and also allowed to thrive in its absence.
Finding conflict in hope
“A Place to Belong” is my first solarpunk story. I’d been trying to write solarpunk for quite some time, but the greatest obstacle for me was always this: Where’s the conflict in utopia? Without conflict, there’s no narrative. Dystopia is basically lots of conflict, happening to most people in most parts of the world all the time. Pick your favourite and you’ve got a story to tell. But what kind of narrative tension can exist when the struggle is over and the fight for a better world has been won?
See, that was my mistake. The struggle isn’t over just because humanity has passed through our troubled technological adolescence and emerged, somewhat worse for wear, older and wiser and newly equipped to make better choices. Honestly, as hopeful as I am for us, I suspect that the struggle to make good choices will never be over, because we are, on the whole, very much a “Hold my beer!” kind of species.
And who’s to say, anyway, that utopia means the same thing for everyone? As a neurodivergent author trying to find my place in a world that’s already a bit of a sensory nightmare, this was an idea at the forefront of my mind when I sat down to write “A Place to Belong.” The story gives humanity a technological second chance, in the form of offworld colonies designed as a lifeline for the population of a failing planet, but they’re a poor fit for folks like my autistic protagonist, Laura. It’s not until she’s sent to repair the bio-electric weave powering one of the small, subsistence farming communities just beginning to thrive on the ravaged planet’s surface that she understands that a technological promised land is no paradise when it’s built with other people’s comfort in mind.
In “A Place to Belong,” humanity finally gets its act together, but its key mistake is in imagining “humanity” is one homogenous block. That’s where the conflict creeps in.
The power of hopeful storytelling
At its core, solarpunk is about hope. It’s an act of rebellion against despair; a declaration that we don’t have to settle for the future barrelling towards us. But hope doesn’t mean utopia — I’d argue that there’s no such thing. Conflict doesn’t disappear in a world in which humanity has collectively decided to be our best selves. It evolves. The challenge lies not in the absence of struggle but in our understanding of who we are.
A solarpunk future is not an endpoint — it’s a new chapter. Weaving all our diverse threads into stories of hope is a reminder that even in times of uncertainty, human connection remains our greatest asset — and also, always, a rich seam of narrative conflict for us authors to mine.
Links to works mentioned
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