World Weaver Press Acquires English Rights to Brazilian Solarpunk Anthology

Portuguese edition cover by Editora Draco

World Weaver Press has acquired the rights to publish an English translation of the science fiction anthology Solarpunk – Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em um Mundo Sustentável, originally published in 2012 by Editora Draco in São Paulo, Brazil. Solarpunk is an anthology of optimistic science fiction stories compiled by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, which envision a world run on renewable energies, featuring nine authors from Brazil and Portugal including Carlos Orsi, Telmo Marçal, Romeu Martins, Antonio Luiz M. Costa, Gabriel Cantareira, Daniel I. Dutra, André S. Silva, Roberta Spindler, and Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro. The anthology will be translated from Portuguese to English by Fábio Fernandes, and publication is expected in the first half of 2018. Portuguese artist José Baetas will create interior illustrations for the anthology. A Kickstarter campaign will run during the summer of 2017 to assist with translation costs.

**Update**: The Kickstarter campaign runs August 14 to September 14, 2017. Find more here.

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About the Anthologist

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro had two novelettes published in Brazilian Asimov’s: hard SF “Mythic Aliens” and “The Ethics of Treason”; the latter was the first alternative history story in Brazilian and Portuguese science fiction. His alternative history novelette “The Vampire of New Holland” won the Nova Award in 1996, while his SF novelette “The Daughter of the Predator” won the Nautilus in 1999. His main short fiction collections are: Other Histories…, The Vampire of New Holland, Other Brazils, Taikodom: Chronicles and The Best of Carla Cristina Pereira. Gerson has published four novels so far: Xochiquetzal: An Aztec Princess Among the Incas, The Guardian of Memory, The Adventures of the Vampire of Palmares and Strsangers in Paradise. He has edited eight short fiction anthologies so far: Phantastica Brasiliana, How Lustful my Alien Girl Was!, Vaporpunk, Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, Fantastic Erotica 1, Super-Heroes, and Dinosaurs.  Beyond the science fiction borders, he published Vita Vinum Est!: History of Wine in the Roman World.

About the Translator

Fábio Fernandes lives in São Paulo, Brazil. He has published two books so far, an essay on William Gibson’s fiction, A Construção do Imaginário Cyber, and a cyberpunk novel, Os Dias da Peste (both in Portuguese). Also a translator, he is responsible for the translation to Brazilian Portuguese of several SF novels, including Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and A Clockwork Orange. His short stories have been published online in Brazil, Portugal, Romania, the UK, New Zealand, and the USA, and also in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction (2011), The Apex Book of World SF, Vol 2, Stories for Chip. He co-edited (with Djibril al-Ayad) the postcolonial anthology We See a Different Frontier. He is a graduate of Clarion West (class of 2013), and a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine.

What is Solarpunk?

Solarpunk is an emerging subgenre of optimistic science fiction that imagines the radical possibility that we might not destroy ourselves and our planet (or that if we nearly do, we'll get it together after that). Like Cli-Fi, eco-speculation, and eco-weird, solarpunk engages with issues of climate change, renewable energies, and the politics of sustainability, and explores the implications of those changes through a human lens. While other types of climate fiction usually present a bleak, dystopian, or apocalyptic vision of the future, solarpunk is hopeful, often portraying unique adaptations to ecological challenges.

While there has been much discussion about solarpunk as an aesthetic, there are few defining texts that put these ideas into practice—which is one reason we felt it was so important to bring this Brazilian anthology to an English-speaking readership. Many of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson fit the description, especially Pacific Edge (1990) and New York 2140 (2017). Other anthologies of solarpunk short fiction include Wings of Renewal, edited by Claudie Arseneault and Brenda Pierson (2015), and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland (forthcoming 2017).

WWP editor-in-chief Sarena Ulibarri blogged about solarpunk last year, so if you're curious, check out her blog post The Brighter Futures of Solarpunk. For more on solarpunk as a movement and an aesthetic, check out Solarpunks.Tumblr.com.

Thank you to the team at Editora Draco for this opportunity!