Solarpunk Creatures

A collection of mostly very short solarpunk stories with a focus on interspecies relationships. As with any collection, I liked some, disliked some, absolutely loved a couple. There weren’t any I absolutely hated, which is in a way pretty exceptional for a short-story collection, though some were a bit too didactic, and the plotless, more essay-like pieces were not much to my taste. There were also a few art pieces, among which my favorites were the imagined pages from the notebook/sketchbook of a traveler researching various multispecies sustainable environments and habitats of the future. Here’s a quote from one, “Kombucha Atoll (Adaptation and Ingenuity)”: “Rich dude’s technofix gone bad, salvaged by adventurous show more creatures: not the first time!”

I’d like to mention just a few of my favorite stories of this collection:

“Threadloom” by N. R. M. Roshak. A sweet story of an organic loom animal that has creative urges of its own.

“AI Dreams of Real Sheep—More at 8” by Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio. A linguistic AI gains sentience, escapes its lab in a roomba, and makes a friend who helps it achieve its dream.

“Quarropts Can’t Dance” by Rodrigo Culagovski. A funny story about inter-xeno-species con men who run a pickpocketing scam. As the collection’s introduction says, “The tongue-in-cheek story reminds us that solarpunkish earnestness can sometimes stray close to boorish self-righteousness or clichéd sentimentality, and that it’s good to not take ourselves too seriously.”

“Leaf Whispers, Ocean Song” by Tashan Mehta. A beautiful love story about linguists who learn to talk to animals, and plants, and a huge mysterious creature that arrives at the coast of Goa from the ocean’s depths. But mostly it’s about love that transcends death, through the web of life that surrounds us. show less

Several years ago, World Weaver Press published the collection Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, exploring concepts of "more-than-human urban coexistence and kinship." In Solarpunk Creatures, the editorial team goes one further, imagining not just human alliance with other species, but expanding the definition of what it means to be a living thing. Largely set in worlds dealing with climate change or its aftermath, these stories delve into relationships with animals, AIs, and even landscapes as living, thinking entities with which we must learn to cooperate.

Just like the last volume, I love Solarpunk Creatures's ultimate optimism - that in a world seemingly growing more and more precarious through ecological collapse and show more predatory capitalism, there are still ways to heal and persevere without resorting to gas wars and football-pads-and-assless-leather-chaps ensembles. What saves the Earth in these stories is not just thoughtful sustainable infrastructure, but acknowledging the agency of the creatures and landscapes around us. Deserts seek sustenance for their children, swamps fight fascism, and interstellar fungi try to show how fun they really are. Many stories are more thought-pieces than anything else, sprinkled with illustrations and art instillations imagining a less human-centric world. Particular favorites were Sandra Ulbrich Almazan's 'The Colorful Crow of Web-of-Life Park', where a formally-pet parrot runs away to join a murder, and 'AI Dreams of Real Sheep - More at 8' (by the expansively named collectives Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio) where a poetry research AI "comes out" as a person, and then goes on the run for fear that people will think they're one of "those AIs".

All in all, this is a lovely, positive, thought provoking collection. I hope World Weaver Press continues to showcase unique stories like these, inspiring what a kinder, healthier world may look like. Thank you to them and LibraryThing for furnishing a review copy of the ebook. show less

Solarpunk: Creatures was a lucky find when I was looking for something else on library shelves, something interesting I could take home and find out more about.

I hadn't heard about this new genera, one where authors need to build worlds that don't yet exist, ones that are for the most part hopeful, utopias instead of dystopias. And, to me, there are already too many dystopian stories and books out there. We live in a time when literature and video is mostly dark, and hope raising stories may seem too fantastic to believe. But because of the darkness it's all the more important that books like this be available.

With 26 stories in about 300 pages, most are fairly short. I like short stories, often more than novels, but some of them here show more seemed maybe too short, seemed to me that more pages could have fleshed out backgrounds and details.

Some of my favorites were Calliope Papas' "Quorum Sensing"; "Rabbits, Rivers, and Prickly Pears" by Justine Norton-Kerston; Tashan Mehta's "Leaf Whispers, Ocean Song"; Bright Flame's "Thank Geo" and others.

All the stories were inventive and all worth my reading. show less

Solarpunk Creatures by Christoph Rupprecht (e-book) is part of a series of books containing Science Fiction short stories on ecology and interspecies relationships that reflect today’s issues. Based on the Introduction, you might expect it to be a scholarly literary work, but I got no such vibe from it. Instead, it was a set of engaging tales made to draw you in and make you consider where we are and where we may go.

Each piece is set somewhere around Earth, with a couple off-planet, predominantly in the US. Most feature young female protagonists. They are equally setting-based and character-based, with vivid descriptions of the settings. The stories are interspersed with nature-based art in various media.

There are several related show more themes throughout the book. Primarily, the stories are about Earth's ecological demise and possible renewal. Many are optimistic, but not all. Some are trying to resurrect the current society, while others chart a path to an evolution of society. Key is that everyone and everything contributes to life and whether or not it survives the Anthropocene period.

They all reflect different parts of nature communicating, how humans have impacted the biosphere from varying points of view. There’s the hope that, in the future, humans will learn from their mistakes and use their brains and tech to fix Earth for all, or accept help from those who know better, before it's too late.

I quite enjoyed the book, although it’s not my regular fare. I decided to read it to acquire different perspectives and styles, and it certainly met my expectations. I recommend it to anyone interested in Science Fiction or science, especially biology or ecology, or looking for entertaining prose with food for thought.

Below are brief synopses of each story, but BEWARE! They contain spoilers!

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THREADLOOM
Weaves (no pun intended!) together tech and nature into a pleasant tale of young & old people changing their views when confronted by unprecedented change, even when stressed by deadlines.

SONORA'S JOURNEY
A wistful story of the rejuvenation of an ever-growing desert thanks to ecological reclamation work, almost too late, reflected by a mother's death-defying journey to find water for her children.

KELP GARDENS AND STORMWATER STREAMS
Amusing brief piece from the future of 100+ years from now, describing how we seem to finally learn how to coexist.

THE COLORFUL CROW OF WEB-OF-LIFE PARK
An intriguing and hopeful tale of cross-species acceptance, offering hope that tech will benefit nature, not decimate it.

THE BUSINESS OF BEES
A cat discovers that bees have somehow learned to bend human tech to their purposes, whatever they are.

NIGHT FOWLS
Humans and fauna work together intelligently and find that interspecies communication is the key, while relearning old lessons about conflict and sacrifice.

WATER CYCLE
The climate crisis from water's point of view.

MICROBIA
Another alternative future showing how some brave and creative people have worked to salvage hope from a bleak world after ecological disaster.

RABBITS, RIVERS AND PRICKLY PEARS
Two teens and a sentient hare find fruit and hope at the edge of their world.

HUNTING FOR RAIN
There are no more dogs, but Hunter is a good boy, helping his people survive.

AI DREAMS OF REAL SHEEP - MORE AT 8
The first sentient AI just wants to herd sheep and write poetry. Not much to ask for.

AN INCONVENIENT UNICORN
The farm is now desert. So what if we sell it for energy production and housing? Can even a unicorn bring things back?

QUORUM SENSING
A refugee to Europa, in pain from a war not hers, makes peace with her gift, despite the fear of an alien organism.

FLYBY
Comet Izumi watches and listens to life over the eons of its existence in the solar system.

QUARROPTS CAN'T DANCE
Every sentient species has dancers and con-artists.

THANK GEO
Society has collapsed, then we found out that we're just one part of an intelligent global network of life, working together for all. How will humans, with a really bad history, and others interact?

OUR MINDS SHARE A CITY
This new job requires a unique relocation.

HOPDOG
Humans can be cruel and uncaring, so they train dogs to be the same. But dogs still remember the joy of the pack and desire its safety.

SOLAR MURDER
Crows can be nasty and intelligent creatures, with good memories. But securing energy is just too important.

MOTH CITY (DIVERSITY) - Project entry #17 and KOMBUCHA ATOLL (ADAPTATION AND INGENUITY) - Project entry #21
Pockets of humanity start to learn about the true web of life, but there’s a long way to go.

THE WETLANDS VS THE MAYOR
We can still learn from foolish old-fashioned political priorities and save nature... and ourselves.

LEAF WHISPERS, OCEAN SONGS
A love story between two people and the whole planet. Very deep and moving. show less

Another anthology of climate-change short fiction, interspersed with art. The fiction was good, the art I thought more than a bit meh (coloured art on a grey-scale 300 dpi eInk screen is always going to be meh). The other problem I found with the art was that it came across as unrelated to the climate-change theme; it was more along the line of rather twee crafts. Linking the art as illustrations to specific stories would have worked far better. The stories themselves were the usual mixture of good, indifferent and bad. Overall, I thought the quality wasn't as good as the previous collection; this may have been related to the inclusion of the art which came across as padding. An OK read, but nothing particularly memerable about it.

Solarpunk Creatures was good, but it was not what I was expecting. I was expecting more art. I was expecting stories populated by a new generation of eco-friendly cyborg creatures. The very first story in the collection was somewhat like what I expected the rest to be, but most of the stories didn’t have any sort of cyborg creatures. One exception was a story told from the point of view of a cat who witnesses a hive of bees taking apart human drones and creating mechanical bees from the parts. There was no more to the story than that however – it was very, very short. How the mechanical bees might fit into the society in the story was never brought up. I didn’t get any real glimpse in these stories of what hybrid creatures might show more come to exist in the future. I got, instead, stories about climate change. But they were good ones, and creative ones. In one story, a desert was personified. Another had drops of water as the narrator. Linkages via fungal mycelium allowed humans to talk to plants in another. show less

It's difficult to build whole futures in a few thousand words; the stories in this collection offer glimpses and possibilities, rather than answers and entire histories. Pieces are by turns hopeful, realistic, thoughtful, aspirational, cautionary; in combination, they are greater than the sum of their parts, and very relatably human for all their exploration of biological and technical beings. A relatively quick, enjoyable, and optimistic read.