The problems lie in the “punk” part. Just like cyberpunk’s prophetic bad stuff isn’t the cyber. Pretty sure solarpunk is still about the societal issues existing in what could be a utopia if they didn’t. Wealth inequality, bigotry, etc. You’re just not polluting the planet because everything is green.
Um, no. It’s the very opposite of that. Solarpunk addresses inequality and bigotry directly.
I mean that those things still exist in the world. The stories are about fighting those things, usually as John points out. Unless you’re saying the status quo is without inequality and bigotry and the heroes are trying to be a counter to that?
No, there may be inequality and bigotry in some solarpunk fiction but unlike cyberpunk it’s not about “our heroes fighting the system that will almost inevitably crush them”. Solarpunk is innately hopeful, and there’s conflict (kinda intrinsic to storytelling) but it doesn’t require the existence of inequality or bigotry, and a lot of solarpunk fiction explicitly doesn’t have any bigotry in it period.
Cyberpunk might be about “our system sucks, and our heroes may or may not want it to change”, but solarpunk is about “the system of the modern day was bad, and so we replaced it entirely”. The “punk” part doesn’t require that the heroes are individually punks within the context of their own world, it’s called punk because it’s in contrast to our modern system. Also because -punk is kinda a generic term for genres at this point.
