Fighting for the Future

ADVANCE READER COPY- - - -Cyberpunk: a sci-fi subgenre featuring technological and scientific achievements such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia, and decay. Solarpunk: a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, technology and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question: What does a sustainable and equitable civilization look like, and how can we get there? Cyberpunk and solarpunk are, in many ways, two parts of the...
More Description

ADVANCE READER COPY- - - -Cyberpunk: a sci-fi subgenre featuring technological and scientific achievements such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia, and decay. Solarpunk: a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, technology and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question: What does a sustainable and equitable civilization look like, and how can we get there? Cyberpunk and solarpunk are, in many ways, two parts of the same story. Cyberpunk is all about people surviving and fighting back in high-tech, low-life dystopias. Solarpunk is a more utopian subgenre of cyberpunk that tells stories of communities surviving, adapting to, and solving the climate crisis in decidedly post-dystopian worlds. But the foundational aspect shared by both genres is people and communities fighting for a better future. The context around that struggle may be different from one genre to the next, but the fight-the struggle-is one and the same. In this way, cyberpunk and solarpunk are sibling genres, and we feel like it couldn't make any more sense to pair the two into a single short story anthology. The anthology has three kinds of stories. There are cyberpunk stories, solarpunk stories, and stories that straddle the line bring the two genres together in one narrative.