“Generic Energetic: Contemporary Popular Genres as Tools for Transition.”

Thinking with the young genre of solarpunk, this talk proposes a way to answer two large questions. Firstly, how do the structures of popular contemporary genres – their traditions, the narrative and symbolic strategies that they make available, their meaning-making affordances – how do these shape our efforts to imagine alternative energy futures? And secondly, how is the real-world crisis – the urgent need for transition – transforming these popular genres?

Beginning with an argument for a historical and situated methodology that builds from John Rieder’s recent intervention into genre studies, the talk considers the real-world communities of practice engaged with solarpunk, and outlines the early process of accretion that gives rise to the genre. It then identifies and takes a deep dive into two elements of the generic tradition that shape and are shaped by solarpunk: Light, and Magic, and how these elements inform the kinds of alternative energy futures imagined within the genre. This work stands as a first effort in a larger project to understand the intersection of contemporary popular genres – SF, Fantasy, Utopia, weird, eerie, what might be loosely termed the fantastical genres – as tools for meaning-making, on the one hand, and the urgent need for transition to a renewable future, on the other.

Rhys Williams is a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow at Glasgow University. His research is focused on questions of genre, energy, environment, and pedagogy, in particular using the tools of contemporary genre to make meaningful and desirable alternative futures. He has published in Science Fiction Studies and Paradoxa, and is the editor of Paradoxa 26: SF Now.