The Working is solarpunk!
I hedged on this tag for the last few weeks. Perhaps you saw my book birthday post that included the Lunarpunk tag:
But I’m the one who wrote the Solarpunk Station guest blog about the nonbinary nature of solarpunk and lunarpunk where I argued that lunarpunk is best considered part of the solarpunk container.
“If we separate lunarpunk from the amorphous, pluralistic solarpunk memetic engine, the container becomes less rich, the engine has less fuel.
“What would I call lunarpunk and solarpunk combined? Perhaps just solarpunk.”
I had a rich conversation on Mastodon today with Pawel Ngei (@axld) co-author of Solarpunk Prompts and a few others about the distinctions among solarpunk, lunarpunk, and hopepunk. I’ve seen wildly different definitions and examples of these—not that I want a static definition defined only by a few. Our conversation, and re-reading Ashton K. Arnoldy’s essay Cyber-Solar-Lunar𝘗𝘶𝘯𝘬, convinced me to go back to calling my novel solarpunk.
Thus, my revised Book Birthday graphic:
Listening to Myself
As I said in the Solarpunk Station guest blog and in other writing about solarpunk: spirituality, magic, and non-Western science enrich solarpunk and are not—or should not be—separable. They belong in the amorphous, generative container of solarpunk.
In truth, I feared pushback from labeling my novel solarpunk. But, hey. Now I’m listening to myself!
I hope you’ll read The Working however we classify it! (Don’t get me started about official genre labels that distributors accept.)
The Working is out now from Water Dragon Publishing in print and ebook editions. Consider ordering it through your local bookstore or bookshop.org. Or ask your library to obtain it.
(And … I’d greatly appreciate you posting reviews [of any length] on the major sites.)