I hoped that Terra Nil would introduce people to the complexities of ecosystem management. This is how you get the solarpunk landscape that presently exists: Goodreads calling the "cyberpunk for the upper-middle class" YA novel The Summer Prince solarpunk, niche short fiction writing groups producing pastoral utopias as they breathlessly explain how their world works, and multiple activist communities rallying around what can and must be done now to mitigate the effects of the ongoing climate apocalypse. To some, it is merely an aesthetic like steampunk: greenery, sustainability, and cities described best as either "green Apple" or "quaint." To others, it is a new politic focused on local community, sustainable solutions, and a refusal of the colonial capitalist "exploit over there for immediate comforts over here." To yet more, it is an idealized vision of the future, one whose apparent attainability (if only Big Oil or some other capitalist bogeyman would let it) makes it feel both possible and punk to even believe it could exist (see also: noblebright, hopepunk). Today, solarpunk is many things to many people. Restore, recycle, repeat, and above all, chill. Building on the theme "start with nothing," the team of vfqd, elyaradine, and thejunt used pixel art and procedural generation to create "a relaxing city-builder about ecosystem restoration." While the art style, building functions, and even aspects of the gameplay loop would eventually see many changes before release, much of Terra Nil's core can still be seen even in this early prototype. Terra Nil began life as a game jam game for Ludum Dare 45. Many people were independently imagining solarpunk, foreshadowing future conflicts over the genre's nature. ![]() They wrote stories about femme fatales disposing of bodies in their eco-friendly waste recycler, biological weapons developed alongside the next GMO crop, and ultra-wealthy cannibal experimentalists fancying themselves carnivorous plants. Unlike other originators of solarpunk, the authors collected in this anthology took inspiration from cyberpunk, not steampunk. 2012 saw the publication of the Brazilian sci-fi anthology Solarpunk – Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável (translated in 2018 as Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World). Inspired by contemporary products from SkySails Group (now SkySails Power), a then-manufacturer of large kite sails to provide wind-based assistance for cargo and fishing ships, they imagine a partial return to older technologies in the face of diminishing oil access. In fact, the exact same term had been proposed in a 2008 Wordpress article by Republic of the Bees. The 2014 Tumblr post was not actually the beginning of solarpunk. You play as an ecological restoration expert at a remove, using automated technology to detoxify and irrigate a region, restore the local flora and climate, and reintroduce local fauna, before finally recycling all of your buildings and disappearing from the landscape via an airship, leaving the area as though it had never suffered humanity's failings. In the future, Earth (or at least, an Earth-like planet) has been ecologically devastated all plant life has died, the air is cold and arid, and the earth is poisoned until nothing can grow on it. Terra Nil released March 28, 2023, developed by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital. ![]() This marked the beginning of solarpunk's spread into popular consciousness, and my introduction to the concept. They coined the term "solarpunk" to describe their theoretical genre, taking inspiration from steampunk. ![]() The author proposed a near-future science fiction genre, one built on the backs of sustainable energy, ecological consciousness, the return of the handicraft. In 2014, a Tumblr post juxtaposed some fashion concept sketches with a series of cityscapes – most imagined, though some were carefully selected and framed photographs of places that exist already.
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