INVENTED WORLDS · THE –PUNK MODULE
03 / 03 — AFTER 01 CYBERPUNK, 02 STEAMPUNK
SOLARPUNK
The only one of them with no villain.
01
What It Looks Like
- The Light
- daylight, always; the sun is the whole argument.
- The Line
- organic curves; stems, tendrils, insect wings.
- The Structure
- glass and white iron, built to let plants in.
- The Surface
- living things growing over made things.
- The Power
- sun, wind, tide; visible, local, shared.
- The Feeling
- repair rather than escape.
One is a printer's advertisement from 1898. The other is a drawing of a mountain made of glass, from 1919. Solarpunk was named in 2008 and has been borrowing from both ever since.
02
Two Men Drew This World Before It Had a Name
Alphonse Mucha, working in Paris in the 1890s, turned advertising into a vocabulary of stems, whiplash curves and flowering borders — the line solarpunk still uses.
Bruno Taut, in 1919, drew Alpine Architektur: a series of visionary drawings proposing that whole mountain ranges be rebuilt in coloured glass, so that architecture might make people better. Neither was designing a sustainable future. Both were drawing a world where the made thing and the living thing use the same shapes.
03
The Word Came From a Cargo Ship
In 2008 an anonymous writer on a blog called Republic of the Bees published a post titled "From Steampunk to Solarpunk." The trigger was the MS Beluga SkySails, a real cargo ship fitted with a computer-controlled towing kite to cut its fuel use.
The argument was plain: when cheap oil ends we will not go backwards, we will run older energy with newer control.
04
The Name Arrived First. The Look Arrived Six Years Later.
2008 the word — 2014 the look — 2019 the manifesto
This is the strangest thing about solarpunk. The word came out of an argument about energy and carried no pictures at all. The look — glass, greenery, Art Nouveau curves, warm gold — assembled itself around 2014 through concept art circulated online, and was written down in A Solarpunk Manifesto in 2019.
Cyberpunk got its language and its look within two years of each other, and they matched. Solarpunk got a name first and had to grow a face afterwards — and when it went looking, it found Mucha and Taut waiting.
05
The Three Questions, and the Broken One
- Which Machine Rules
- sun, wind, tide. Renewable, local, legible.
- Who Holds Power
- nobody in particular. This is the point.
- Who Fights Back
- nobody. There is no oppressor left to fight.
Every other -punk runs the same engine — a technology, the power it concentrates, the people who resist. Solarpunk keeps the first, dissolves the second, and leaves the third with nothing to do. It is a -punk with the punk removed, and it kept the suffix anyway.
This is where the suffix begins to come apart.
06
Where the Curves Came From
Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, issued between 1899 and 1904, filled plate after plate with radial symmetry and organic structure, and handed Art Nouveau a pattern book drawn from biology.
Solarpunk reaches past a century of straight lines and picks the same book up again.
07
And It Does Exist
Kew's Palm House, glass and white iron, was completed in 1848 — a building made to keep a jungle alive in London. Solarpunk's architecture is often described as futuristic, but most of it has already been built once, in the nineteenth century, for plants.
08
Optimism as a Position
Cyberpunk assumed the future would arrive and be worse. Solarpunk treats a liveable future as something to be designed rather than awaited.
The fair criticism, stated plainly: with no conflict it risks becoming a mood board rather than a story, and it has always been easier to draw than to write.
A genre that had to invent its own hope, then go looking for a face it could borrow.