The city's last billboard is kept as a monument, and nobody can agree what it should say.It has been blank for a year. Turn: it is given to a different street each month.
The tool library's only tall ladder was borrowed in spring and never signed back in.The orchard needs it now. Turn: it is holding up a neighbor's bean vines, who took it for a gift.
A hermit at the edge of town takes nothing from the commons and gives nothing to it.The town debates whether that is allowed. Turn: in the storm, his is the lamp that guides the ferry in.
A boy sent to clean the school's solar panels finds a message written in the dust.It says Look up. Turn: a pen pal in the tower across the square has been waiting a year.
A cargo barge that runs on sails is three weeks late, and the town is out of coffee.The wind has been wrong all month. Turn: the town sends bicycles down the towpath to meet it halfway.
A desert town sells its spare noon sunshine to a city, and now the city wants the mornings too.The price is good. Turn: the town keeps its mornings, and offers to teach the city instead.
A family lives on a canal boat with a deck of panels and follows the summer north.This year the daughter wants to stay put for school. Turn: the school has a mooring, and a job for a boat.
A hailstorm cracks half the panels in the valley in one afternoon.The repair list is a year long. Turn: the glassblowers' school takes it on as the final exam.
A kite that flies itself to gather wind power comes down in a schoolyard two valleys away.It has an address stitched into it. Turn: the class walks it home, and the two valleys meet at last.
A lighthouse converted to solar power years ago has never missed a night, until tonight.A cormorant has nested on the panel. Turn: the keeper lights a lamp by hand, and the bird stays.
A tide mill has powered the harbor town for two hundred years, and the miller wants to retire.Nobody young wants to keep the moon's hours. Turn: a baker from the night shift applies.
A town calls its shared battery the Pantry, and somebody has been drawing from it at night.The amounts are small and steady. Turn: it is the bakery, starting the ovens early so bread stays cheap.
A town on a windy coast names each of its turbines, and the oldest is to come down for a newer one.Children leave flowers at Old Marguerite. Turn: her blades become the roof of the bus shelter.
A town that runs on sunlight gets eleven days of fog in a row.The shared battery is down to a fifth. Turn: the town votes on what to switch off first, and the vote is the story.
An old woman will not have panels on her roof because of the swallows nesting under its eaves.Her street is one roof short of its share. Turn: the neighbors build a stand in her yard, shaped like a sunflower.
The bathhouse's new solar heater works so well that the old stoker has nothing left to do.He sits by the door all day. Turn: he is asked to keep the stories the furnace room used to hear.
By the roofers' custom, every new solar roof gets one panel frame painted by a child.One roof has gone dark. Turn: the dead panel is found by its drawing of a cat.
During a week of calm, a town's wind-driven clock stops, and nobody agrees what time it is.Shops open when they feel like it. Turn: the town likes it, and keeps one clockless day a year.
Every house on the street pedals for an hour to light the midwinter festival.One house has nobody strong enough. Turn: the street carries the bikes to her porch and pedals there.
On the longest day of the year, a town has more power than it can store and must decide how to spend it.Last year it lit the bridge. Turn: a child's idea wins, and the pool is heated for a night swim.
Two villages share one small river dam and disagree over how much water should go to the fish.The meeting is held on the dam. Turn: an old angler shows them where the fish already go around.
The village power grid is run by a committee of five, and the youngest member is twelve.She was elected as a joke. Turn: she is the only one who reads the meter logs, and she finds the leak.
The wind turbine on the hill hums one note, and a child with perfect pitch says it has gone flat.The engineers hear nothing. Turn: a bearing is failing, and she is given the hill to listen to.
The repair café 20
A bicycle has been mended so often that none of its first parts is left.Its owner wonders if it is still her mother's. Turn: the menders show her the old frame number, kept on a tag.
A boy inherits a robot lawn mower from the old days and tries to teach it to weed.It keeps mowing the lettuce. Turn: he fences the lettuce and gives it the footpaths.
A boy who breaks everything he touches is sent to the menders as a last resort.He drops a tray on the first day. Turn: he is the only one who can say exactly how each thing broke.
A girl brings the same toaster to the repair café every week, broken in a new way each time.The menders are puzzled. Turn: she takes it apart at home to learn, and they give her an apron.
A girl builds a boat entirely out of what the tide leaves on the beach.It floats, barely. Turn: the harbor master measures it, logs it, and gives it a berth number.
A phone from the old days holds one last voicemail, and its battery is nearly gone.The owner cannot bear to lose it. Turn: the menders copy it to the town's story shelf, where it can be asked for.
A seed-planting drone starts planting in a pattern nobody gave it.From the hill, it looks like writing. Turn: it is following the old field lines from before the fences.
A traveling tinker's cart arrives with tools the town has never seen.The regulars at the repair café are jealous. Turn: she trades the patterns for a winter's lodging and a bench.
An apprentice mender is handed a radio that has been silent for fifty years.She gets it working at midnight. Turn: someone, somewhere, is still reading out the weather.
Everything mended at the café leaves with a tag saying who fixed it and when.A coat comes in wearing nine tags. Turn: the tenth mender is the grandchild of the first.
The oldest mender is losing her sight and can still tell a loose screw by its sound.She wants to stop. Turn: she teaches mending by ear, and the class is full.
One week, the repair café runs out of broken things.The menders' tea goes cold. Turn: they start on what nobody dared bring: the town clock, the old footbridge.
The repair café is asked to mend a friendship.The menders say it is not their trade. Turn: they sit the two at one bench with one broken chair between them.
The repair café keeps a shelf of things nobody could fix, just in case.A traveler asks to look. Turn: three of them, put together, make something that works.
The repair café's best mender can fix anything and will not touch a clock.A stranger brings one in. Turn: it is the clock he broke as a boy, and its owner has kept it for him.
Someone leaves a mended teapot on the repair café's step every Monday.There are eleven now. Turn: a bus driver on the night route has been fixing what she finds in the scrap bins.
The tool library's only tall ladder was borrowed in spring and never signed back in.The orchard needs it now. Turn: it is holding up a neighbor's bean vines, who took it for a gift.
The town's maker space has one rule: build anything, as long as you teach one person how.A girl builds a thing nobody understands. Turn: teaching it is how she finds out what it is for.
The town's printer breaks in the week of the harvest notices, and the only spare part is in a rival town.The two towns do not speak. Turn: the part arrives with a note asking a small favor back.
Two menders have argued for years over whether to glue or to sew.A torn tent arrives that needs both. Turn: they start from opposite ends and meet in the middle without a word.
The seed library and the garden 20
A boy maps every fruit tree in the city that anyone may pick from.His map has one bare street. Turn: he plants it himself, and will be twenty before it bears.
A girl grafts six kinds of apple onto one tree for six neighbors who do not get along.Each waters only their own branch. Turn: the tree does not care whose water it is.
A girl is given the worst plot in the community garden, in the shade under the bridge.Nothing she plants comes up. Turn: mushrooms do, and by fall she is feeding the street.
A greenhouse on the old highway overpass grows lemons where snow used to fall on trucks.One winter night the heating fails. Turn: the neighborhood sleeps among the trees to keep them warm.
A newcomer from a dry country plants her garden the way her mother did, and the neighbors think it is wrong.July brings a drought. Turn: hers is the only green plot, and she is asked to teach.
A school grows its own lunch, and this year the youngest class is in charge of the pumpkins.They have planted far too many. Turn: the school holds the town's first pumpkin fair to give them away.
A vine planted to shade the library has covered the windows and is starting on the door.Nobody wants to cut it. Turn: the librarians train it into a reading porch.
An old man keeps the last lawn in the district and trims it with scissors.The neighbors want a meadow. Turn: he keeps a square the size of a blanket, and lends it out for picnics.
The bees from the rooftop hives have stopped visiting one balcony.Its owner takes it personally. Turn: she plants what her grandmother grew, and the bees are back in a week.
The city's oldest parking garage is an orchard now, and one tree on level three will not fruit.The gardeners have tried everything. Turn: it wants company, and a second tree is carried up the ramp.
The compost crew wins the town's highest honor, and nobody wants to sit beside them at the dinner.They smell of the work. Turn: the dinner is moved outdoors, and they are served first.
The floating gardens on the reservoir drift loose in the night and fetch up on the far shore.The village there has already started weeding them. Turn: the gardens are shared, with a rope ferry between.
The forest garden's oldest walnut has to come down, and the town cannot agree what to make of it.There are forty proposals. Turn: it becomes forty small things, one a household, and one sapling.
The harvest is so large that the town runs out of jars.The plums will not wait. Turn: every window on the main street dries fruit for a week.
One packet in the seed library has no label and has never been borrowed.A child takes it home. Turn: nobody alive knows the plant, and the town waits a summer to see it flower.
The seed librarian finds a card signed out to a man who left town forty years ago.The seeds never came back. Turn: they are growing wild along the road he left by.
The seed library keeps a wheat the town has grown for longer than anyone can say, and a mouse gets into the drawer.Eleven grains are left. Turn: eleven households take one each, and none of them dares fail.
The seed library lends seeds on one condition: bring back more than you took.One borrower is three years late. Turn: she returns with a new bean, bred on her balcony and named for the librarian.
The town's chickens have the run of the streets, and one has started laying on the tram.It rides to the end of the line daily. Turn: the driver puts in a nest box and posts the schedule.
Two rooftop gardeners on facing buildings compete over tomatoes and have never met.They signal with flags. Turn: a storm takes one garden, and the other sends half its plants across on a line.
The town meeting 20
A family arriving from a flooded coast is given a house by lottery.They draw the one with the leaking roof. Turn: the street turns up on Saturday with ladders, as it does for everyone.
A floating village must agree whether to drift south with the season or anchor for the school year.The vote splits old from young. Turn: the school asks to be towed.
A girl is too young to vote at the town meeting, so she is allowed to speak last at every one.The grown-ups wait politely. Turn: the meeting starts asking her to speak first.
A hermit at the edge of town takes nothing from the commons and gives nothing to it.The town debates whether that is allowed. Turn: in the storm, his is the lamp that guides the ferry in.
A neighborhood keeps a book of favors owed, and one page has been torn out.Everyone suspects everyone. Turn: the page was a debt forgiven, torn out by the one who was owed.
A newcomer asks who is in charge and gets a different answer from everyone she meets.She needs one signature. Turn: she collects all of them, and that turns out to be the rule.
A town decides everything by meeting, and tonight's meeting is about whether the meetings are too long.It is in its fourth hour. Turn: a child proposes a sandglass, and it passes without debate.
A town has no locks, and a visitor asks what happens when something is taken.Nobody remembers. Turn: that night something is, and the town has to invent what happens.
A town that uses no money is visited by a traveler who has nothing else.He keeps holding out coins. Turn: he is asked what he can do, and it takes him a day to answer.
A town votes on a name for its new bridge, and the winning name is a joke.The elders are appalled. Turn: in ten years nobody remembers that it was one.
A town with no mayor receives a letter addressed to the mayor.Somebody has to open it. Turn: they draw lots, and the winner is mayor for the length of one letter.
The canal is cleaned by two people chosen by lot each month, and this month they cannot stand each other.They share one boat. Turn: by the fourth lock they have agreed on one thing.
Each year the town holds a parade for whatever it got wrong, with a float for each mistake.This year's mistake is still being argued. Turn: the float rolls out unpainted, and the crowd paints it along the route.
Every child in the town is given a tree at birth, and one boy's tree has died.He will not say that he minds. Turn: the forester offers him the oldest tree, the one with no child.
Four hundred people share one car, and a wedding and a moving day both need it on Saturday.The booking sheet has both names. Turn: the car takes the cake and the couch, and the guests carry the rest.
The meeting to decide what an old factory should become has a thousand ideas and one building.The list covers a wall. Turn: it becomes the place where the other 999 are tried, a month each.
The river is given a seat at the town meeting, and someone must speak for it.The job goes to the ferryman's daughter, aged nine. Turn: she votes no, and explains with a jar of water.
The shared kitchen's sign-up sheet has the same name on the worst shift every week.Nobody has met him. Turn: he signed up to be left alone, and the town must decide whether to thank him.
The town's library of things lends a cargo bike, a tent, a cello and one very good coat.The coat has not come back. Turn: it is at a job interview in the next town, for the third try.
Two neighborhoods want the same empty lot, one for a playground and one for a pond.The vote ties three times. Turn: the children draw a plan with both, and a bridge.
What the old world left behind 20
A boy finds a gasoline car in a barn and wants to know what it sounded like.Nobody has the fuel, or wants it. Turn: the oldest neighbor does the noise for him, with her mouth.
A data center is found sealed and cold, and nobody knows what is stored in it.The town votes on whether to look. Turn: it holds strangers' birthday photos, and the town throws one party for all.
A flock of delivery drones from the old days still flies its route each morning with nothing to carry.The town has grown fond of them. Turn: a child ties a letter to one, and an answer comes back.
A grandfather was a miner, and his granddaughter's job is to turn the mine back into forest.He will not come to see it. Turn: she brings him a jar of blackberries picked at the pit head.
A landfill has been capped and planted, and its hill is the best sledding in the county.A boy's sled hits something hard. Turn: it is an old street sign, with the name of his own street.
A power station's cooling tower has become a roost for clouds of swifts.The town wants the bricks for a school. Turn: the school is built around the tower, and class stops at dusk to watch.
A seawall that failed is now a reef, and the town that moved inland comes back each year to swim over its old streets.A girl dives for her family's doorstep. Turn: an octopus has moved in.
A shopping mall has been a forest for forty years, and a girl finds an escalator still standing in it.Moss covers every step. Turn: her grandmother tells her what it was for, and she does not believe it.
A woman who remembers traffic is asked to teach children how to cross a street that has none.They think it is a game. Turn: she finds she likes the game better than the memory.
An airport is now a wetland, and a heron nests in the control tower.A pilot from the old days comes to visit. Turn: she climbs the tower and talks the heron in to land.
An office tower is a farm on every floor but the top one, which is kept exactly as it was.School groups file past the desks. Turn: one child's great-aunt is in the staff photo, laughing.
An oil tank by the harbor has been made into a concert hall with a very long echo.A shy choir is booked. Turn: the echo sings their mistakes back in harmony.
An old stadium is now the town bathhouse, with the hot pool where the center line was.Two elders still argue over the last game played there. Turn: they settle it with a race across the pool.
The city's last billboard is kept as a monument, and nobody can agree what it should say.It has been blank for a year. Turn: it is given to a different street each month.
Divers salvaging metal from a drowned district find one room with the light still on.It runs on a cell nobody recognizes. Turn: it is a reading lamp, left on for someone coming home.
The last gas station is a tea house, and its sign still shows a price nobody understands.A visitor offers to pay it. Turn: the owner charges him a story instead, as she does everyone.
The old highway is now a long garden, and one family still walks its white line every spring.The children ask why. Turn: it is the road their great-grandparents drove in on, the day they stayed.
One parking meter still stands on the main street, and children feed it buttons for luck.One day its door falls open. Turn: inside is a coin, and a note from the last driver who was late.
The town clock was built from the parts of a thousand old phones, and it chimes in their ringtones.At noon it plays one nobody can place. Turn: the oldest woman in town answers it, out of habit.
The town's museum of waste has one exhibit that children are not allowed to touch: a plastic fork.A boy touches it. Turn: it does not break, and that is the lesson.
How it works
These 100 solarpunk story ideas are set in futures that went right: towns run on sun and wind, a repair café, a seed library, a town that decides everything by meeting. Under each is a detail and a possible turn.
Read the full guide
Where the trouble comes from in a hopeful future
Nobody on this list is saving the world; that part is done. The trouble is local: eleven days of fog, a ladder never signed back in, a tied vote over an empty lot. Neighbors settle it, usually with tools.
What the old world left behind
A fifth group is set among the leftovers: a shopping mall that has been a forest for forty years, an airport that is now a wetland, and a last gas station that serves tea and charges a story.
Show how one thing works: who cleans the panels, who signs out the ladder.
Let a child or a newcomer ask the question the town stopped asking.
Questions and answers
What is solarpunk?
A genre of speculative art and fiction centered on ecologically sustainable futures, described as the inverse of cyberpunk. The term dates from 2008. Solar stands for renewable energy and an optimistic view of the future, punk for do-it-yourself and counterculture.
What makes a story solarpunk?
Technology that helps people live with each other and with nature, and a do-it-yourself spirit: gardens, tool libraries, maker spaces. Its typical hero has been called a maker-hero. Here that is a girl who takes a toaster apart every week to learn.
Does a solarpunk story need conflict?
Yes, and it can be small. Solarpunk worlds are not necessarily utopian; they are an alternative to a dystopian outcome. On this list two villages share one river dam and disagree over how much water should go to the fish.
How is solarpunk different from cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is dark and grim, and its technology leaves people alienated. Solarpunk is bright, and its technology helps people co-exist with their environment. The town on this list shares one battery and calls it the Pantry.