‘Solarpunk Creatures’: Sci-Fi anthology brims with hope as it explores our kinship with other beings

Solarpunk – a worldview that imagines hopeful futures of social justice, planet-friendly technologies, decentralisation and harmony – has come quite a long way since its first appearance in an online article in 2008. Today this genre of science fiction is being explored by multiple authors, poets, academics and critics all across the world. The ultimate goal of these stories and the associated politics is to imagine and work towards a future of coexistence, which acknowledges our kinship and interdependence with all beings big and small, as an alternative to wandering about a zombie apocalypse or sinking in dystopian gloominess.

After the publication of the much-acclaimed anthology Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, the editors decided to publish another anthology focusing on creatures, the more-than-human allies who would live with and among us in a possible future. The editors, Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri and Sarena Ulibarri have collectively brought this second offering, a second anthology titled Solarpunk Creatures, three years after the first.

A multispecies imagination

Explaining the rationale for this collection of stories, the editors write in their introduction, “Where Multispecies Cities sought to broaden the spotlight and highlight the multitude of actors on the stage, Solarpunk Creatures introduces a whole new cast of more-than-human protagonists: organic and digital,...

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