Writing aspirational fiction is hard. If you're trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting and that requires so much knowledge to do well. Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permiculture practices, modern airship design and operation, phytoremediation, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there's both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you're writing in a dystopian setting, and the differences are pretty clear.
It's a lot for any one writer to try and take on. Luckily we don't have to work alone. Any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.
Writers often need a level of detail that's hard to find in publications - news articles and pop science stuff tends to be too broad and lacking in specific detail (or incorrect) while industry publications tend to go in-depth on a narrow slice of a topic, assuming the reader has the baseline knowledge to put it into context. Our goal here is to start a culture of packaging up and sharing writer-level research to make writing solarpunk easier. If you've recently researched something for your own projects, or you're just someone who's passionate about a solarpunk subject and wants to see it represented correctly in fiction, this wiki is intended to provide a centralized place where you can share it!
If you have something you'd like to add, message the mods or post in the /c/writing community!
Nautical Solarpunk – A Resource for Solarpunk Writers and Artists