LUNARPUNK

Solarpunk's night side — a liveable future where the light comes from living things.

Both plates come from the same source, a naturalist cataloguing marine invertebrates at the turn of the twentieth century. Nothing in either picture is lit from outside.

Every other world in this family has a person and a date attached. Cyberpunk has a story title from 1983. Steampunk has a letter to a magazine in 1987. Dieselpunk has a game designer in 2001. Solarpunk has a blog post in 2008 and a manifesto in 2019.

Lunarpunk has none of that. No coiner, no founding text, no date. It surfaced inside the solarpunk community as a name for what solarpunk looks like after dark, and the definition was assembled by agreement — community magazines running pieces titled "What is Lunarpunk?", each one adding a little.

For an aesthetic built on mystery and withdrawal, arriving anonymously is a fitting accident.

The community's own definition works by contrast with its daylight twin:

• science and technology→occult and spirituality
• solar panels→bioluminescence
• community→the individual
• flowers→fungi

Solarpunk is a daytime argument about energy policy, made in public, with a manifesto. Lunarpunk is what one person thinks about at three in the morning. Same house, same values, opposite temperament — which is why the community calls it solarpunk's goth sibling.

The stated position goes further than mood: lunarpunk lets future science meet the supernatural, and treats that meeting as the interesting part.

The engineering claim underneath the atmosphere is modest and partly real. Bioluminescent algae in sealed vessels, and glowing trees and fungi, as path lighting that needs no wiring and no switch. Mycelium grown into sheets and blocks, replacing leather, paper, packaging and structural panel.

If your light is alive, it is dim, it is cold, it is green, and it does not come on when you want it to.

So the palette follows from the power source. Every visual habit of this aesthetic follows from that one constraint.

The visual vocabulary was finished long before the word existed, and by people who were not imagining anything.

Anna Atkins, beginning in 1843, produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions — the first book illustrated with photographs. She laid specimens on paper coated with iron salts and let the sun print them. What comes out is Prussian blue with the specimen standing in white. The palette of this entire aesthetic exists, complete, in 1843, made by a botanist with no interest in the future.

Ernst Haeckel drew the radiolaria and the jellyfish between 1899 and 1904 as a catalogue of natural form. Étienne Trouvelot drew the aurora and the moon in 1881 and 1882 by looking through a telescope and recording what he saw.

Three people describing what was in front of them. The look was already there to be found.

Solarpunk builds the thing. Lunarpunk goes and sits with it.

Solarpunk had to invent its own hope and then go looking for a face to borrow. Lunarpunk inherited both and asked a quieter question: once the future is liveable, what is it like to be alone in it at night.

That is a smaller question, and it is the reason this one has produced more pictures than arguments.