Publisher of the solarpunk series
Lin of Luratia
a coming-of-age trilogy featuring nanotechnology, the wonder-material graphene, and a cloudy, solar-powered planet known as Luratia.
Cri of Egli
a young adult series about modern-age slavery, ubiquitious surveillance, the bounds of freedom, and the bonds of love.
Solarpunk is a nascent fiction genre, whose writers and artists dare to wonder:
What if we actually, amazingly don't pollute our planet to the point of unlivibility, or bring ourselves to nuclear extinction, or collapse beneath crumbling societies ravaged by rampant cyberattacks?
What if the future is a better future, a life worth living?
How will we pull it off?
How do we get there from here?
It's not easy to imagine positive futures, given the world we live in, and it's even more difficult to elucidate pragmatic solutions to real-world problems. But that's what solarpunks are excited about. That's what they're taking on.
Solarpunk is an answer to sci fi author Neal Stephenson’s call for “a return to inspiration in contemporary science fiction.”
Finally, a healthy alternative to the dingy, disparaging worlds of dystopia.
Solarpunk is light, bright and hopeful. But crafty too, with an eye on sustainability and the clever use of what we have and how we can optimize it. The punks in solarpunk are lovers of life and beauty. They're resourceful, sagacious, and refreshingly cooperative.
Solarpunk wants to show us a better, more mature, more collaboratively creative side of human nature, cast against the backdrop of our emerging technological landscape.
I'll have some of that, please.
I'm Melanie, by the way, and I've written two solarpunk sci fi series:
Lin of Luratia — Luratia being the name of my solarpunk world, and
Cri of Egli — a story of modern-age slavery on Luratia's remote continent of Egli.
Albereo (spelled Albireo by some) is one of the most beautiful double stars in the visible universe. It is made up of a small blue star and a large golden yellow star. Since they sparkle like brilliant jewels when viewed through a telescope, astronomers refer to their color as sapphire and topaz.
From a distance, a binary star looks like a single star but really it is two stars, paired up for many billions of years, locked in a gravitational embrace from which they never waver. The two stars are often of different mass and size, but still they remain joined in perfect equilibrium. You might be amazed to know that most stars in the universe are binary.
Stars grow bigger and hotter as they grow old, and the eventual death of a star is not a quiet passing — some stars expire with a massive supernova explosion. Each star in a binary pair evolves in this way, but they do so at different rates. When one star grows so big that its mass begins to endanger the life of its companion, it transfers its mass to the smaller star. The death-explosion of the larger star is delayed, often for millions or billions of years. By giving part of itself to the other, the larger star lengthens the lives of both. It is a demonstration of a beautiful truth of kindness: when one shares unselfishly, all will benefit — even eventually the one who gave.
