A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Chambers’s Monk & Robot series is widely regarded as one of the best literary examples of solarpunk, a social and aesthetic movement associated with environmentalism and ecocriticism. The trajectory and growth of this movement as a genre can be traced through its connection with science fiction.

Science fiction has long used imaginary worlds to make cultural and philosophical comments about the real world. By setting their stories in fictional cultures, authors often explore difficult ideas that they might not be able to approach as effectively in realistic fiction. For example, in the Star Trek episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” broadcast in 1969, the writers confronted the irrationality of racism. Likewise, Octavia E. Butler‘s 1979 novel Kindred confronts the legacy of slavery in the United States.

While the term “science fiction” did not become common until the 1920s, many earlier works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and H. G. Wells War of the Worlds (1898) were later classified under this title. By the 1970s, a new kind of pessimistic and dystopian science fiction gradually surfaced. Many recognize William Gibson’s 1981 short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” published in Omni magazine, as one of the first examples of a science fiction subgenre labelled “cyberpunk,” a phrase coined by writer Bruce Bethke in1983. The word “cyber” implies stories about humans with mechanical or computerized parts, while the word “punk” conjures edgy, nihilistic youth culture. By 2000, fiction and film firmly established cyberpunk in the world of science fiction. Cyberpunk envisioned a negative dystopian future where humans struggle for existence in a ruined environment.

About the same time, however, a literary and aesthetic movement began in Brazil that offered a more optimistic vision of the future. The term “solarpunk” was first coined in 2008 and has steadily gained ground. As journalist Olivia Lai writes, “Amid rising climate anxiety and an intensifying climate crisis, solarpunk offers an unapologetically optimistic vision of the future that imagines a radically different societal and economic structure in harmony with nature” (Lai, Olivia. “Solarpunk Is the Future We Should Strive For.” Earth.org, 2022). Thus, solarpunk fiction often creates utopian societies that have learned to use renewable energy and green technology. As a movement, solarpunk writers believe that with hard work, humans can overcome the environmental problems the Industrial Age introduced. Proponents say that they actively search for solutions rather than engage in unremitting despair. While cyberpunk literature is generally cynical and often asserts that life has no meaning, solarpunk values honest emotion, human connection, and existential meaning in cooperative endeavors. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy makes clear that although not all questions can be answered, the journey to find out is worth the effort. The solarpunk world of this novel values mutual exchange for common benefit and places personal connection and reciprocity between beings as the highest good.