Sci fi has more or less exploded in the last few decades. I know there’s hard sci fi, space opera, and a lot of punk genres. What subgenres are you guys really enjoying? Anything niche?
And are there any subgenres you think should become a thing?
SolarPunk is really nice sometimes. I’d say Becky Chambers (Monk & Robot) and Martha Wells (Murderbot) are kind of the leaders in that genre although I think you could maybe say Kim Stanley Robinson is really the grandfather of it all with stuff going all the way back to the Mars trilogy and the Coasts trilogy, but there’s also quite a few authors that I would also submit belong there. For example…
- Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder
- Walkaways by Cory Doctorow
- Delta-V and Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (and also to a degree Daemon and Freedom)
- Rich Man’s Sky and Poor Man’s Sky by Wil McCarthy
- Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
- Ministry for the Future by KSR
- Infomocracy by Malka Older
- Gamechanger and Dealbreaker by L X Beckett
Some of these aren’t nearly as cozy and heart-warming as stuff by Becky Chambers tends to be, but they all try and portray a positive future for us rather than some bleak dystopia with no way out.
Solarpunk I have a real hard time conceptualizing. Maybe because there’s less “punk” here than cyberpunk. The only thing I’ve read out of all those is Murderbot and those are some fun novellas. A few of those other books are on my to read pile.
What would you say makes something solarpunk? Murderbot definitely has an anti-establishment thing going for it with Murderbot hacking its governor module to do its own thing, so I can see the punk in there at least.
I think it just sort of derives from cyberpunk, which was all about the near future and the street finding its own uses, but in this case instead of it leading into a dark dystopia, the authors are trying to find a way for it to lead into something more positive? Like where corporations and governments don’t rule everything.
So, for example, Stealing Worlds starts out being about hiding out from the government in a LARP game, where surveillance cameras show up as guards and you’re smuggled from house to house via slave escape routes, etc. But then it gradually segues into taking that farther and exiting the traditional economy completely.
Delta-V and Rich Man’s Sky are about billionaires trying to jump start expansion beyond planet Earth. Termination Shock and Ministry for the Future are about fighting climate change in new ways that ignore the current government/corporate interference that has prevented taking direct action.
Basically, there is a little bit of the “punk” aspect in each of them, just in the fight to make something better for people happen now instead of later at some nebulous point after the current crop of politicians finally expire. Some more than others, but it’s interesting stuff none-the-less, and a really good thing to think about IMHO.
That sounds really positive. I’ll have to check those other books out
