{"id":4937,"date":"2018-07-18T16:05:38","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T16:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=4937"},"modified":"2021-02-28T01:04:09","modified_gmt":"2021-02-28T01:04:09","slug":"review-solarpunk-ecological-and-fantastical-stories-in-a-sustainable-world-ed-gerson-lodi-ribeiro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=4937","title":{"rendered":"Review: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, ed. Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-4423\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/solarpunk-1-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"137\" height=\"206\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/solarpunk-1-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/solarpunk-1-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/solarpunk-1-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/solarpunk-1.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 137px) 100vw, 137px\" \/><strong>translated from the Portuguese by F\u00e1bio Fernandes<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a style=\"color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.worldweaverpress.com\/\">World Weaver Press<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>August 7, 2018<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>286 pages<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a style=\"color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.worldweaverpress.com\/store\/p153\/Solarpunk%3A_Ecological_and_Fantastical_Stories_in_a_Sustainable_World.html\">grab a copy<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>Contents:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cSoylent Green is People!\u201d by Carlos Orsi<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cWhen Kingdoms Collide\u201d by Telmo Mar\u00e7al<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cBreaking News!\u201d by Romeu Martins<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cOnce Upon a Time in a World\u201d by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cEscape\u201d by Gabriel Cantareira<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cGary Johnson\u201d by Daniel I. Dutra<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cXibalba Dreams of the West\u201d by Andr\u00e9 S. Silva<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cSun in the Heart\u201d by Roberta Spindler<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cCobalt Blue and the Enigma\u201d by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">Stories set in a sustainable future world: you&#8217;d think that they&#8217;d be optimistic, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">As these nine authors from Brazil and Portugal point out, however, nothing is ever that simple. Renewable energy and technological advances sound great as ideas, and even work well at times when put into practice, but whenever humans are involved, such\u00a0 goals have the potential to deteriorate into nightmare scenarios. That&#8217;s what Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro asked the authors to explore in <em>Solarpunk<\/em>: what humanity would look like in a sustainable world. As Sarena Ulibarri notes in her preface: &#8220;The stories in this anthology are far less utopian and pastoral than much of the English-language solarpunk I&#8217;ve read. There is quite a lot of death and violence in them, and several of the stories show that just because a corporation or government is &#8216;green&#8217; doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s free of corruption&#8221; (2).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">Before I talk about some of my favorite stories in this unique anthology, I want to praise the translator, F\u00e1bio Fernandes, for bringing these stories from Portuguese into English so that us Anglophone readers can learn about how Brazilian and Portuguese writers are thinking about a topic that interests the entire world, both politically and socio-economically. He brings out the humor, pathos, and irony that these stories exude, and translating nine different authors for one volume must necessarily be challenging, but Fernandes handles it expertly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">To the stories, then! A few major themes run through this collection: humans using other humans as power sources, corporations exploiting an unsuspecting public, and the synthesis of humans and plants. How each author addresses his or her chosen theme differs radically, which of course isn&#8217;t surprising.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">The trope I found most interesting was that first one: people exploiting their fellow human beings in the race for cleaner, cheaper, abundant energy. Carlos Orsi&#8217;s &#8220;Soylent Green is People!&#8221; (the first story in the anthology and one of my favorites), Daniel I. Dutra&#8217;s &#8220;Gary Johnson,&#8221; and Andr\u00e9 S. Silva&#8217;s &#8220;Xibalba Dreams of the West all offer fascinating, original takes on how such exploitation might happen. If you recognize the Orsi title as a quote from <span class=\"st\"><em>Soylent Green, <\/em>a 1973 American post-apocalyptic science fiction\/noir film, then you&#8217;ll know from the beginning that horror is in store (unfortunately, I didn&#8217;t know the quote until I read the story, and this knowledge or lack thereof will influence how you read it). Orsi plays around with genre just as he does with the reader&#8217;s expectations: ostensibly a detective story, &#8220;Soylent Green is People!&#8221; slowly veers into the genre that it shares with its namesake, uncovering the horror of a technology that can extract biodiesel from animal protein. Who uses it against whom, though, is a spoiler that I won&#8217;t supply here. You just have to read the story *wink\/nudge*. In &#8220;Gary Johnson,&#8221; a Brazilian priest and American scientist collaborate to try and photograph the human soul, subsequently intending to pull it into our dimension and harness its enormous energy. When the experiments go horribly wrong, the priest dedicates himself to stopping the American scientist from using the technology to perpetrate genocide. Unlike the previous two stories, Silva&#8217;s &#8220;Xibalba Dreams of the West&#8221; offers a more (unfortunately) recognizable picture of humans exploiting other humans: this time as slave labor in search of new sources of energy for a dying nation.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">Like those stories about human exploitation in search of energy, the two pieces about humanity&#8217;s relationship to the sun are fraught and complicated. While Telmo Mar\u00e7al&#8217;s &#8220;When Kingdoms Collide&#8221; imagines a growing hostility and near-civil war between humans and human-plant hybrids, Roberta Spindler&#8217;s &#8220;Sun in the Heart&#8221; optimistically imagines a time when humans could use photonutrition (like the process of photosynthesis in plants) as a way to use the increasingly-intense sunlight. Noted throughout the collection is the fact that Brazil has one of the world&#8217;s highest levels of insolation (4.25 to 6.5 sun hours per day), so it&#8217;s not surprising that stories in this anthology would focus on how humanity might change how it interacts with this abundant resource (in a way that&#8217;s more efficient and cleaner than solar panels).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">If you&#8217;re at all interested in speculative fiction about the environment and humanity&#8217;s future potential relationship with energy, you&#8217;ll definitely want to read <em>Solarpunk<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>translated from the Portuguese by F\u00e1bio Fernandes World Weaver Press August 7, 2018 286 pages grab a copy &nbsp; Contents: \u201cSoylent Green is People!\u201d by Carlos Orsi \u201cWhen Kingdoms Collide\u201d by Telmo Mar\u00e7al \u201cBreaking News!\u201d by Romeu Martins \u201cOnce Upon a Time in a World\u201d by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa \u201cEscape\u201d by Gabriel Cantareira<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=4937\" class=\"more-link themebutton\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[148,645,643,644,149,646],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4937"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10267,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4937\/revisions\/10267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}