Just wait till HG Wells Time Machine comes true and a bunch of almost blind underground mole dwellers predate upon the idiotic surface dwellers who never think past the needs of today. Oh.
I noticed this with cyberpunk stuff, too. The genre has been incredibly prophetic. It just sucks that it’s all the stupidly bad shit and not a single one of the super cool sci-fi things.
This is very true. I use iSH on my phone to run python scripts and ssh into servers, I use Working Copy to make git commits from the toilet or my bed. Like for all intents and purposes, my phone is a cyberpunk “deck,” but I suppose cyberpunk is literally named “The Dark Future” for a reason, considering all else that is going on.
“Meanwhile, Black Mirror presumably got back to the work of its horror-based arms race, as the show continues to try to find a doomsday prophecy that tech giants might still view as a warning and not a corporate benchmark for [next fiscal quarter].” – AVClub
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.
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.
My former landlord, my former employer, various corrupt businesses and my own family managed to all commit a series of crimes against me in rapid succession, which made me poor and thus unable to afford a lawyer, and homeless, which made me lose all my evidence I would need to stand a chance of winning any court case, in addition to everything else I have ever owned.
I have nearly died about ten times now in the past year and a half.
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