by Jennifer Lee Rossman
　
The hot Australian sun scorches your skin. There's hardly a tree or blade of grass in sight because the desert is too dry to sustain them. The climate is so unforgiving, half the town lives in underground dugouts and converted opal mines.

It sounds like the setup to a futuristic sci-fi story, but this is a real town called Coober Pedy.

Most of the world's opals come from this part of Australia, and temperature in the opal mines stays cool while the mercury topside regularly reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Naturally, people decided it would be more comfortable to live down there.

The underground homes are furnished and lit just like the ones above-ground, and only the rock walls and lack of windows give any indication that you're underground. They have dugout motels, churches, and shops, and Coober Pedy is famous for its golf course. No, it isn't underground, but it is played in the cooler temperatures of night, with balls that glow in the dark.

I've been transfixed by this town since I learned it existed, and had to make a futuristic version.

In "Riot of the Wind and Sun," Coober Pedy has seen climate change raise temperatures to an unbearable extreme, and no one lives on the surface anymore. I've also imagined a series of tunnels that create a fully subterranean city, and turned the land topside into a massive solar and wind farm to give it that uniquely solarpunk aesthetic.

My version of Coober Pedy is a town trying to thrive in an unforgiving world that has forgotten all about it. It might not look like much on the surface, but it's a vibrant and colorful little gem, if you're just willing to dig a little.

Jennifer Lee Rossman is a science fiction geek from Oneonta, New York, who enjoys cross stitching, watching Doctor Who, and threatening to run over people with her wheelchair. Her work has been featured in several anthologies and her debut novel, Jack Jetstark's Intergalactic Freakshow, will be published by World Weaver Press in 2019. A time travel novella, Anachronism, is out now from Kristell Ink. You can find her blog at jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and Twitter at twitter.com/JenLRossman.

by Commando Jugendstil and Tales From the EV Studio
 
Commando Jugendstil was born in 2011 in Milano, during a series of intense brainstorming sessions.
 
Our aim was to solve the problem of energy production and distribution in urban contexts and at the same time that of the progressive loss of meaning of public, collective spaces, which often turn into non-places through dynamics of commodification and abandonment, while refusing top-down solutions that often ignore local realities.
 
Emerging green technologies that were being developed in Italy at the time lit the spark: by using new off-grid solar technologies such as OPVs and DSSCs we would be able to empower local communities, and enable them to self-affirm in full cultural and energetic autonomy by instigating the collaborative production of artefacts, that are at the same time beautiful and useful, in this specific case huge solar “affiches” that would cover the empty sides of buildings, a bit like murals.
 
All of these ideas coalesced into a MA thesis for which the real-life Loopy produced a series to test affiches and a video-scenario to present the project, an attempt to imagine a possible world.
This short animation, which you can find at http://cargocollective.com/mikeoloopie/Commando-Jugendstil, has been presented at the Urban Centre of the Comune di Milano and at the DESIS Philosophy Talk 2014: Storytelling & Social Innovation of Eindhoven Design Academy, and has won a special jury mention for outstanding and original project at the Talent Almanack Prize 2013.
 
Galvanised by those results, we set out to participate in various contests for tech incubation and to obtain collaborations with academics who were developing those technologies, however we eventually realised that the technologies we sought to use, even though they are being developed and improved at breakneck pace, are not yet ready for extensive use in the field.

We were in the situation of not yet being able to make real what we imagined, but at this stage we were also reminded that if you can’t imagine something, you sure as hell can’t make it real. We decided then to invest our efforts into creating a fertile environment of the imagination in which we would later be able to implant our ouvres.
 
It was then that we realised that what we had been doing for some 7 years had a name, that its name was solarpunk, and that, like us, a lot of other folks out there were busy imagining possible worlds based on green tech and an optimistic outlook on the ability of people to change our world and society for the better.
 
The casual discovery of World Weaver Press’ Kickstarter campaign for the translation of the Brazilian solarpunk anthology “Solarpunk – Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável” was like a clarion call for us, even though we caught it too late to contribute.

We then decided to get in touch with the folks from Tales from the EV Studio, another small collective of creatives, specialising in comics and creative writing, and asked them to imagine how an action of the Commando could unfold. We provided them with the background and the technology, and gave them carte blanche for the rest. But let’s hear it from them.
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Tales From the EV Studio usually specialises in historical fantasy and archanepunk, but as soon as we realised how much punk you can put in solarpunk, and how much social justice, we immediately jumped to the occasion. The folks from Commando care about marrying green technology to progressive politics that benefit urban communities. We decided to immerse their action in contemporary Italian politics, making them tackle the debate on ius soli citizenship for second generation migrant minors, one of the issues closest to our heart.

For the atmosphere we took inspiration from some of our favourite movies, the “Smetto Quando Voglio” trilogy, because of the setup of night-time, daring actions and the central role of broke academics, and from Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, because of the oniric and almost surreal quality of the incidents.
 
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It was a great adventure for all of us, from start to finish. We almost couldn’t believe it when we were shortlisted, but this amazing result has pushed us to continue this joint venture to write more stories about a greener, fairer Italy, and to seek more collaborations with academics and architects to finally make our solarpunk visions real.
 
So stay tuned, because this ain’t over yet!

Commando Jugendstil is a real-life small collective of Italian solarpunk creators who aim to conjugate green technology and art to make cities a better place to live in and build creative communities.

Website: http://cargocollective.com/mikeoloopie/Commando-Jugendstil

Tales From the EV is a posse of emigrant Italian writers who specialise in historical fantasy, archanepunk and scriptwriting for comics. This is their first foray in the realms of solarpunk.
 
Website: https://talesfromtheevstudio.wordpress.com/

Love science fiction, but wishing for visions of brighter futures instead of the standard doom and gloom? Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers is available now in ebook and paperback! This anthology features 17 stories of brighter futures from authors all over the world.

Solarpunk is a type of optimistic science fiction that imagines a future founded on renewable energies. The seventeen stories in this volume are not dull utopias—they grapple with real issues such as the future and ethics of our food sources, the connection between technology and nature, and the interpersonal conflicts that arise no matter how peaceful the world is. In these pages you’ll find a guerilla art installation in Milan, a murder mystery set in a weather manipulation facility, and a world where you are judged by the glow of your solar nanite implants. From an opal mine in Australia to the seed vault at Svalbard, from a wheat farm in Kansas to a crocodile ranch in Malaysia, these are stories of adaptation, ingenuity, and optimism for the future of our world and others. For readers who are tired of dystopias and apocalypses, these visions of a brighter future will be a breath of fresh air.

Sarena Ulibarri is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, and she is also a fiction writer who has been published in Lightspeed, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weirdbook, and elsewhere. Her solarpunk story "Riding in Place" appeared in the anthology Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures. She lives in a solar-powered adobe house in New Mexico, and can be found online at SarenaUlibarri.com and @SarenaUlibarri.

Find out all about the authors here!

On June 16, 2018, from 12-1 EST, please join us for the #SolarpunkChat Twitter chat! World Weaver Press is hosting this month, and the topic will be Sustainable Technologies of the Future. We'll be talking about all the Earth-friendly tech that already exists and what could exist someday, as well as what kinds of interesting technology makes for great optimistic sci-fi stories even if it probably isn't practical in real life. Everyone with an interest in environmental speculative fiction is welcome to join. This chat is a great way to connect with other solarpunk, eco-speculation, or cli-fi readers and writers. A few of the authors from the Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers anthology are likely to stop by.

Not sure what solarpunk is? Check out our explanation here, and browse the Solarpunk Reference Guide here.

How does a Twitter chat work? Basically, we'll start with introductions and then post a number of questions throughout the hour. Use the hashtag #solarpunkchat in every tweet or response you want the other participants to see, even if you're responding or quote-tweeting. Using the hashtag creates a sort of chatroom within Twitter — click the hashtag and sort for "Latest" to see what other chat participants are posting. Our questions will be labeled "Q1", "Q2", etc. and it's helpful to label your responses "A1", "A2," etc. But so long as you include the hashtag on every tweet, it's all good. For more on how Twitter chats work, click here.

Thanks to Upper Rubber Boot Books, the publishers who brought you Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation, for putting together this monthly chat, and allowing us to host it this month! Here's a glimpse of last month's conversation.