Science fiction has from its inception been interested in imagining climates and technologically sublime energy infrastructures, and in recent years has been adopted as a mode within many kinds of environmental writing addressing climate change. This chapter explores how the counter-cultural movement of ‘solarpunk’ is concerned with imagining both the technological and societal complexity of energy transition, and the conditions civilisations might face in adapting to living in damaged natural environments. Solarpunk operates across multiple disciplines and art forms, including architecture, art, and literature, and typically sees itself as utopian, decentralised, community-driven, and socially progressive. The chapter identifies some common themes and trends within solarpunk literature – including the predominance of the short-story form, the solastalgic aesthetics of the transformed landscape, and the normalisation of renewable energy technologies – and shows how these features aim to influence readers into climate action.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres