Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:
Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they’re more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.
Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. […]
This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term “generative art” would take on a very different insinuation. I’ve certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.
Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)
Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it’s starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.
Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!
I think I’ll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don’t seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.
As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.
That’s a great project. You describe a problem I hadn’t really thought of existing, but now that you say it it’s obvious. Like your Using Every Part Of The Car article. I can see that being so valuable to writers (and also actually educational).
Thanks! I think a part of the reason there’s not a ton of writers in the genre yet is that there’s a high barrier for entry. Changing genres is already fairly difficult and requires a lot of reading and research, but on top of that, aspirational fiction is hard. If you’re trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting, and that requires so much more knowledge to do well.
Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permiculture practices, phytoremediation, modern airship design and operations, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there’s both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you’re writing in a dystopian setting.
And a lot of the information you need isn’t generally widely known yet, and it’s often intensely siloed into several different fields or communities. Just finding out that you should include a specific technology or practice or viewpoint in your story can be a hurdle (we don’t always know what we don’t know), and building up a good enough working knowledge within that field to write it adds even more difficulty.
I think as solarpunk accretes more of a collection of works and a presence in the culture, this’ll get easier. Core knowledge will sort of keep bubbling to the surface until we have a sort of layperson’s mix of broad solarpunk domains to go with the tropes and aesthetic.
But I also think we have a great opportunity to speed up canonization of the topics and themes and tech and practices we care about by collecting and packaging them in a way that makes including them easy for writers and artists. Sort of an onboarding kit or similar.
I’ve got a few ideas for my next articles (when I have time) but if you or anyone else want to gather references on rocket mass heaters and biochar production, or foraging best practices, or whatever fascinates you that you’d like to see in solarpunk, I’d very much encourage you to write something up!
Actually now that I’m thinking of it, perhaps this community would be a better place to centralize this information than on my website etc. As I understand it, each slrpnk.net community gets a free wiki, perhaps perhaps we could eventually set things up so people could contribute resources and get them added?
Very well put. Especially since solarpunk can be seen as sort of utopian (or at least anti-dystopian), and as you say these are culturally less familiar ideas, so you sort of have to justify yourself as you’re writing, specifically because so many people are lacking in the framework of hope and gumption that makes solarpunk make sense IRL and in fiction.
Oh there’s an idea worth exploring… I haven’t explored the wiki beyond reading the manifesto. Is it just a matter of making a
https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:startand linking out to/from it? Definitely seems like a good hub for specifically solarpunk writing resources.EDIT Oh I see, yes the tutorial lays it all out https://wiki.slrpnk.net/tutorial. I’m just heading off to a job, but I’ll check this out when I have a little more time!
If you’d like help, let me know! The Fully Automated community is looking at using our in-house wiki to host community resources too (though we’d eventually like to move to a version anyone can add stuff to directly without being a mod) so we may have some lessons learned we can reuse over here!
If you don’t mind taking point on the wiki, that would be great! Makes sense that there would be solarpunk writing resources associated with the solarpunk writing community.
I agree it would be nice to let anyone at least suggest changes without being a mod, but I guess this is just what we have to work with for now.
Speaking of thinking ahead though, what do you think about a rule against LLM generated content? Not to pass judgement on the technology even, but just to prevent blatant content turfing.
Hi, I’d be happy to help with that! I think it’d be great to make this a community-based resource rather than something fragmented into individual websites!
As for LLM stuff, I don’t see why not. Solarpunk is about imagining and working towards a better future and imaging a better future takes a careful consideration and examination of how we do things, knowledge of alternative ways of doing things, and an evaluation of whether those ways will work in this situation.
I’m mostly familiar with AI attempts at solarpunk art but one of the things that always strikes me about it is how frequently it slips in present-day defaults. AI is trained on reproducing stuff that already exists, and it’s fed on the status quo. I don’t think you can put in decades of car commercials, capitalist realism, and dystopian fiction, and get a radical re-imagining of the infrastructure and workings of society back out. Basically it makes thousands of tiny decisions for you that you might have done differently had you planned it from scratch, and its default decisions push back on some of the central themes and goals of solarpunk. It’s almost insidious.
I’ve seen fewer examples of AI attempting to write solarpunk but when I have, I have the same complaints. Maybe it could be done differently if there was a massive library of solarpunk media to train it on, anarchist and socialist and other revolutionary works, permiculture and agriculture and forestry research, green energy and public infrastructure, architecture and urban planning, DIY and salvage tutorials, and broad swaths of history and alternative ways of doing things, not rewritten from a colonial lens. But from what I’ve seen that doesn’t exist yet and the genre isn’t big enough to get more than a surface level visual back out of the current models.
In the end, I think the imagining should be done by humans, though we can certainly try to centralize some resources to help them with that!