With a busy weekend ahead, I figured that now is just as good of a time to bring to you the first Recommended Analyzing piece of the year. While I normally tend to recommend material to check out that came out fairly recently, the article that I will be recommending today was actually published a year ago. It’s just that someone I know brought it to my attention recently, and the content was so captivating, that I knew I had to write something about it.
In an article published on Ozy.com, writer Tom Cassauwers talks in-depth about solarpunk; a sub-genre of science fiction that, in reaction to the large quantity of dystopian science fiction stories out there, presents stories of optimistic futures where renewable energy is key and race and gender-based discrimination occurs less frequently – if not at all – than present day. While stories of such in this genre began emerging in the early 2010’s, it wasn’t until two years ago where solarpunk showed signs of taking off with new publications and interest from publishers and readers alike.
Reading all this, it makes a lot of sense to me in terms of timing. While dystopian fiction has been around for a long time, it wasn’t until about ten years ago where there was a sort of emergence of it again, particularly for the YA audience, in the form of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent. The year that solarpunk started gaining more attention, 2017, was the year the political climate really started to change when Trump took office here in the United States. In times where life itself is starting to become reminiscent of the dystopian fiction we were all over five to seven years ago, it would make sense that we would suddenly have a longing for a future that is light years better than what is currently happening now.
If anything, this article pretty much explains why I wrote An Absolute Mind in the first place. That’s why going forward, if anyone were to classify my novel as a solarpunk novel, I would totally embrace it.
Obviously, there’s more to the article than what I’ve let on here, so please go and give the whole thing a read. If it spikes your interest, then hopefully it will motivate you to give An Absolute Mind a chance, if you haven’t already, that is.
If you are able to, I hope you can go support me in all that I do by leaving a tip over on Ko-fi. I do a lot of writing that I get paid very little for or not at all, and so this is a way of showing your support other than just reading my content. Donations of varying quantities and frequencies are greatly appreciated.
Also, if you can please take a few seconds and vote for whether or not I should make A Moment’s Worth available as a paperback for its fifth anniversary this summer, that would be a huge help.
Lola By The Bay 