This month's story is "Le carré rouge," by Claudie Arseneault. You can get it for free:
As we've announced on our Patreon, this is going to be the last issue of Solarpunk Press. It's been an amazing, life changing project and we're glad to be able to bring one last story to you.
Issue 10 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "The Flying Camel Goes to Tigerwood," by Lisa M. Bradley. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Issue 9 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "Teen Lunatics" by Cat Darensbourg. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Issue 8 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "Untethered" by Andy Crawford. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Issue 7 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "The Love Song of Laura Morrison," by Jerry Oltion. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Faith Gregory, editor of Solarpunk Press, was interviewed by Sunvault, the upcoming solarpunk anthology, and that interview went online today!
Even though Sunvault is closed for submissions, Solarpunk Press is another paying market looking for solarpunk stories! We talked with co-founder Faith Gregory about what solarpunk means to them.
Sunvault: What drew you to solarpunk and what still inspires you?
Faith Gregory: Honestly, I wasn’t initially interested in Solarpunk. Watson and I worked on the same college newspaper, and they kept bringing it up to me as something I should look into. The idea didn’t really stand out to me, but when they finally got me to look into the community and read some posts, I started to see how important the idea of optimistic speculative fiction is, and that small movements like these are key in changing the socio-political landscape of our respective communities, and how our communities interact with each other.
The events in Orlando were devastating, and we hurt for our LGBTQ communities members deeply.
What happened was caused by continuing intolerance and hatred against others, and we can only work to move forward from that.
In the true spirit of solarpunk, here's how you can help the survivors and families of the Pulse Massacre:
Check out this Huffington Post link to see a variety of places you can donate to the Orlando families and victims, if you have money to spare.
Educate yourself and others about the causes of gun violence and the need for gun control in the United States.
If it's safe for you to, combat those who use Islamophobic rhetoric when talking about the shooter with peaceful and rational discussion. The gunman was not motivated by religion.
Continue to talk to your local and state representatives about improved gun control. It's so important.
And finally, take care of yourself. An event like this is traumatizing to a community, and it's important to check in with yourself and talk to others if it is safe for you to do so.
We'll pull through and improve, don't give up hope.
As an editor in the solarpunk genre, I've also been making attempts at writing solarpunk fiction, my latest being a planned submission to Sunvault Anthology.
I think writing in the genre you edit is as important as reading published works in the genre you edit because it gives you a deeper understanding of what is involved in engaging through writing.
However, when it comes to new subgenres, it can become difficult, because there's not really a lot of source material, and what you're writing is becoming the foundation of this new genre (through world-building).
All writing comes with a deep responsibility to have a social consciousness and an understanding of the power of your words, but world-building a new subgenre can make your words even more fundamental and powerful.
This is equally as important for an editor to recognize, because Watson and I are the ones who are sending these words out there, so this can make picking stories and arduous and sometimes nerve-wracking process.
Another difficulty in writing in a new subgenre is being careful not to rely to carefully on early formulated tropes. This is because it can limit the scope of the subgenre, the scope of your writing, and it can make everything look the same.
Now I'm not saying that means you should avoid the tropes, because some of them I rather like, and others in the community rather like. And some of them are just plain important for the genre, but it's something to be aware of, and forming a story entirely out of the early tropes is going to make it seem more like a parody than a serious submission.
Writing is hard even without working in a new genre, but these are some of the things I've come to learn as I've been cultivating my solarpunk writing.
What are some things you've noticed have been difficult in writing in new subgenres, including or not including solarpunk?
Faith
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation launched their Kickstarter today, and they've raised about $100 in the first three hours, so far.
They're aiming for $5,000, and they open to submissions as soon as they hit their goal. The anthology is planned to release in Spring of next year.
Check it out, and pledge if you want to get your hands on a copy of the anthology as soon as possible. There are still a bunch of special rewards left, including limericks and paintings. (I think I'm the first person to choose a pledge that includes one of Phoebe Wagner's spray art spacescapes, which are really cool.)
and the next day... and the next day...
we're selling zines and t-shirts Conbust 2016
This is the first time we're doing something like this -- we're both very excited and nervous.
So if you're around, come see us in dealer room one. We'll be the punks by the door.
Issue 6 of Solarpunk Press is here! This month's issue is a Flash Fiction special -- we've got two stories for you:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want. You can also get this issue in print for $5 plus shipping right here.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Hey, we're going to be participating in a forum-based solarpunk panel starting on Wednesday, at SFFWorld.com.
You know what's a constant fountain of cool projects that are, to varying degrees, totally solarpunk? Kickstarter. It's where I got my solar puff, where Reading Rainbow got brought back, and just scroll through the most funded projects in almost all the categories, like half the projects could be defended as solarpunk.
And we love supporting cool projects, and since we're both broke, there's nothing we can do that's more helpful than signal boosting! So we're going to start featuring projects as they come around that we think Solarpunk Press readers might be interested.
And the first one we want to higlhight is "Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin," a documentary about an author who I admire immensely. Anyone who's into solarpunk should definitely check out her work: it's amazing, and she's done incredible and groundbreaking things with politics in science fiction.
Arwen Curry, the creator of the Kickstarter page, has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for most of the projected cost of this project -- $600,000 out of $800,000 -- and the Kickstarter has already met its initial goal of $80,000. The plan was to use Kickstarter and seek other grants, since NEH won't release the $600k until she's raised the other $200k.
But since she blew through the first goal so quickly, now she's looking to hit the whole amount -- $200,000 -- from Kickstarter, which would allow her to stop worrying about other funding and get started on the film.
There are 14 days to go, and she's at about $156,000. The lowest reward tier is $10 and $25 is the first one at which you get to see the movie as part of the package. Some of the really huge limited-availability rewards are still available, too.
Solarpunk Press will be taking a three month hiatus from publishing stories after the March issue to pursue grant money and streamline our editorial and creative process. The site will still be updated with new content, but after March the next issue will be in July.
Read MoreIssue 5 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "Without Walls," by A. Gislebertus. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Issue 4 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "The Squeaky Wheel," by Sara Kate Ellis. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
If you like what we're doing here and want to help support us so we can keep putting out this kind of content, consider supporting Solarpunk Press on Patreon.
Hey folks!
For our March edition, we'd like to publish solarpunk flash fiction under 2000 words, which means we will be publishing multiple pieces!
Submissions guidelines and procedures will remain the same, save for the word count. We really want to see what y'all create in the solarpunk universe!
Go to solarpunkpress.com/submit to enter your piece -- we look forward to reading your stories!
Issue 3 of Solarpunk Press is here! The story is "Out of the Storm," by Ian O'Reilly. You can get it for free:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and the eBook is available right here for pay-what-you-want.
In February 2013, Charles Stross wrote a blog post called Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship. In it, he described a problem with systems of power in the 21st century. Extremely simplified, it went like this:
Stross lays it out in much more careful, intelligible detail, so I recommend checking that post out.
I think about that blog post a lot, and I’ve been thinking about it for a couple years now. I tried to wrap my head around that problem, wondering if a reform movement could possibly achieve humanitarian goals, and if so, how they could organize in order to be effective.
I think there are some good examples of this. I think Occupy Wall Street accomplished a lot, totally reshaping the dialogue surrounding distribution of wealth in the United States, and having made its mark, disintegrating rather than being nudged toward Stross’s beige.
And I think solarpunk has this capacity: being flexible, being genre and aesthetic and politics and movement, refusing to take on any official “definitive” version of the concept – we have our goals in mind, and as a community nothing’s stopping us from melting away from one misguided process and re-congregating around more nuanced, effective ideas.
Now, though, I’m the editor of a publication. We have much more concrete processes that we’re tied to, we have structural commitments. Faith and I have an extreme amount of control over the organization, but we’re navigating the “beige” problem from a whole new angle.
And I feel it, leaning into my decisions. The biggest one I’ve noticed so far: We’re not going to run SPP as a charitable organization, because under US law a 501(c)3 corporation, the status we’d need to have, can’t have political opinions; the alternative is to just be a political campaign, and we’re not that.
Faith and I both have bad nights sometimes when we lose sleep worrying that somebody’s going to point out some critical flaw in solarpunk that’s beyond our ability to accept, address, and continue, improved from the experience. It would mean the morally right thing to do would be to shut down Solarpunk Press, a project to which we’ve devoted time, energy, passion and love.
That hasn’t happened, as far as we’re concerned, and since we both know we have this material bias we’re a bit hyper-self-critical when it comes to the ethics of solarpunk. (I think the biggest problem area right now is the inclusion of people of color, especially Black writers and activists, and finding a comfortable relationship between solarpunk and Afrofuturism.)
We hope that any issues with solarpunk will be on the scale that allow the movement to accept criticism and change in response, and we believe that will continue to be the case. We aren’t ready for the alternative, because there’s really no way to be ready for that. But we’re conscious of it, and we’ll keep doing this only as long as we believe it’s a right thing to do.
We sincerely hope y’all will call us out if we’re screwing up.
The issues available are:
They'll be available until December 7, when we'll be closing the preorder, printing them up and sending them out. (We're trying to make sure we get it done in time for folks who want to order it for a Christmas present.) (Also, if this goes well,* in the future we'll be making sure to have it available often enough to make the deadline for other gift-giving holidays.)
We're going to sell up to 50 to manage the amount of envelope assembly we'll have to do if this blows up, but if this does go that well, it pretty close to definitely won't be the last time we put these up.
A magazine for the anthropocene. Short fiction monthly.
010: "The Flying Camel Goes to Tigerwood" by Lisa M. Bradley
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