Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Look, with everything going on in the world and the economy, we all need something to smile

about.

Now, as you know, I personally love sci-fi, and I recently stumbled upon a subgenre

called Solar Punk.

And it's been making me smile as I've been learning more about it, so I hope you want

to learn more about it too.

Here to make a smart about this is Phoebe Wagner.

She's a writer, academic, and editor of three Solar Punk anthologies,

including Sun Vault, stories of solar punk and eco speculation.

Dr. Wagner, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Kimberly.

I'm excited to be here.

So let's start with the basics.

What is solar punk?

Like, how do you usually describe it to people?

The way that I approach it is that solar punk is sort of this genre that spans literature and media,

video games, and that it imagines new futures in the midst of an opposition to environmental collapse,

and importantly then works to create those futures. And Solar Punk stories also recognize that

the climate crisis and environmental collapse are all entangled and then we can't have environmental

justice without social justice, which is what starts to separate it from environmental literature

...