Can solarpunk be noir?
We investigate the history of solarpunk detective fiction to find out
This is a guest post by Cromlyn
“Solarpunk noir?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Aren’t noir texts about hopelessly dark and nihilistic worlds?” This is exactly what Alex asked when I pitched him this piece. Imagine a smoke-stained courtroom as a battered and creased lawyer starts to speak…
As SolarPunk Stories has already explored, there are many shades of solarpunk. So many, I added a couple of my own to their framework. From Thrilling to Happy, Fantastical to Rooted, solarpunk is a broad concept, with space inside it for stories ranging from farming romances to survival tales, kitchen-sink dramas to action adventure.
One type of setting that reoccurs across a few short stories and tabletop games is detective fiction. This makes a lot of sense, it has a clear narrative and believable stakes within a generally utopian or protopian society. It implicitly looks at what people in that society value and find unacceptable. No wonder ‘DI Russo - SolarPunk Detective’ is the first thrilling tale from a better future to be published by SolarPunk Stories.
But can solarpunk detective fiction be noir? Here we get into competing definitions. Otto Penzler argues that though classic hard-boiled private detectives, such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s, Philip Marlowe may bend or break the law, this is done by a protagonist with meaningful agency in pursuit of justice.
Noir works, on the other hand,
“whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists who are seriously flawed and morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak and nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy and alienation lead them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry” [3]
I interpret noir differently. To me, it doesn’t mean the worlds of these stories are irredeemably broken, because that wouldn’t align with solarpunk. I believe its defining feature is a feeling of guilt by the protagonist.
In making my case, I’ll sketch the history of various varieties of noir, while also describing recent examples of those varieties. I’ll explore examples of solarpunk detective stories and I’ll finish with discussing a few ways we might see noir in future solarpunk fiction.
A history of noir
The term Film Noir dates back to 1946, and was used to describe the 1940-1950s film adaptations from hardboiled and noir detective fiction that came before it. That fiction, of anti-hero gumshoes navigating organised crime and often corrupted systems, in turn comes out of the American experience with prohibition in the 1920s and the return of traumatised veterans from the Great War.
These are stories of black depression, grey morals and red violence. The modern UK series set in the same period, Peaky Blinders, makes the shellshock and guilt of the returned men explicit, from the first episode onwards. For me part of the darkness these writers are expressing is a form of survivor’s guilt for having made it through the horrors of the war, even if these men wouldn’t have articulated it that way themselves.
In Boardwalk Empire, the same theme is personified in the tragic figure of Richard Harrow. The traumatised veterans become brutal criminals in an increasingly harsh society. The softness of Art Nouveau fades away, fascism rises and the fiction that made sense in the 1920s is returned to in film form as the Second World War ends and the genre cycle repeats.
The aftermath of the Second World War left a mixed impact culturally. The League of Nations had failed, the unfolding stories of institutional madness led to questions about human nature and exposure abroad was challenging racist institutions back in America.
This was worked through in popular culture by heroic war films on one hand and cynical, fatalistic Film Noir cinema on the other. Did people feel guilty at having failed to make the First World War the ‘war to end all wars’?
Neo-noir film comes in the 1970s at the same time that the Vietnam War was returning brutalised soldiers to society. This is the classic period of Chinatown. The plot centers on corruption as mega-companies exploit water control to force small farmers off the land. The same fatalism and distrust in institutions meets new Cold War suspicions.
Also in the 70s, we have the hippies and peace campaigns leading to the start of the modern environmental movement. Others have already traced the influence of art-nouveau on the aesthetics of this period. The fears of global nuclear devastation led to the first wave of climate-fiction, from the well-known, to hidden gems that shaped my childhood.
We also see the rising fear of pollution, with Nixon creating the EPA in 1970, while the evening news and returning soldiers tell of burning forests and people. A new wave of films were made as people worked through that shame and sense that corporate America was destroying the environment and the immobilizing guilt about living in Omelas (1973). Immobilizing guilt you say? “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”.
Cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s from the same dark roots. The film which did more than any other to instigate that genre is Blade Runner. It drew heavily on noirish themes with its brooding, disillusioned detective cruising from one bruising encounter after another in a grubby world full of hi-tech low lives.
Stepping forward, America’s post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t seem to have generated a new wave of noir. IMDB lists 95 ‘Twenty First Century Noir’ films but new themes seem to be about amnesia and loss of identity, not the environment. Perhaps as reality has become cyberpunk, cyberpunk themes are leaking into mainstream art? Or it is just the long shadow of Blade Runner (and its 1968 noir book origin)? Answers on a postcard.
Solarpunk is a reaction to a cyberpunk world, to the bland commodification of the 2010s and to immobilizing despair. Noir fiction is, I argue, a reaction to guilt and according to Duggan, to despair. The potential synergy is clear, but can I back it up with evidence? Spoilers will follow.
Solarpunk detectives
The very first tale in the very first overtly solarpunk anthology is a detective story. Soylent Green is People by Carlos Oris, follows a private detective in a future Brazil trying to establish the time of death of two victims. He faces antipathy from a corrupt technophobic church, bio-weapon armed thugs and a fatal love triangle.
It was released by Brazilian publisher Draco Editora as part of their groundbreaking 2012 solarpunk anthology with the english translation coming out in 2018. Solarpunk environmentalism is the backdrop and stage setting but not the motive.
Biofuel wealth is old news in Brazil, but using it to render down a body for fuel consumption, in an attempt to absolve yourself of guilt? It’s a set of tropes older than Sweeney Todd. For me the theme reads also as an allegory for guilt over letting other generations take the brunt of climate change while we live high on the hog.
Another story in the same volume, When Kingdom’s Collide by Telmo Marçal, is written in pure hard-boiled detective fiction prose. It follows an ill-fated undercover agent up against a (different) corrupt church whose members have undergone radical surgery to survive off photosynthesis alone.
The analogy is directly that of Portugal’s religious space, with supposedly ascetic church leaders bleeding their followers of wealth. His lover, a believer in the church, is killed and it’s covered up by state corruption. In the end, he’s told to leave it, and over two pages and as many days, transmutes his survivor’s guilt ‘in my belly, I felt the full weight of fasting and failure’, into murderous rage, ‘I’m a man. I have them in my target. I will have my vengeance’.
Grover: Case #C09 920 "the most dangerous blend" by Edward Edmonds, appears in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018). Like the DI Russo - SolarPunk Detective story, it’s more of a police procedural than a true noir. Nonetheless I feel both the motive (getting more limited coffee rations in this climate-impacted future) and the setting (a weather manipulation station) are tied into a sense of authorial guilt over destruction of natural resources. The characters do not say it ‘to camera’ but the author chose the motivating situation as something they feel is emotionally charged enough that murder becomes possible.
And then of course there is The Prodigal, the first in a planned series of SolarPunk Detective tales by SolarPunk Stories. As already mentioned this is more of a hard-boiled police story than a noir text. At the end Detective Inspector Russo does seem to express guilt about not having understood the clues more clearly earlier. Is this just personal remorse or an expression of something larger?
Ideas for future protopian detective fiction
So projecting forward what guilt and themes might we see in future solarpunk detective stories? One is the tension inherent in cities. As a significant density of people, a city will be drawing on larger areas to sustain itself.
It protects itself from the changing climate by intensive infrastructure but not those surrounding areas, perhaps even making it worse by still demanding resources (like the water shortage plot of Chinatown). How does an empathetic city dweller feel about that? Do they try to protect their neighbours? What from?
Another fertile theme is dirtiness. Dirty ecologies and dirty psychologies, to be exact. There are parallels to be drawn with suppressed memories and buried waste. That and exploring restoring degraded ecosystems and combating invasive species while also restoring a degraded sense of self and fighting off invasive thoughts.
This lightly connects back to the early 21st century noir preoccupations with identity and memory. It also makes sense as a way to introduce conflict into a protopian world. Bad memories and a conflict between what we have done and who we are now.
A classic source of guilt in stories is the idea of the sins of the father. Years ago, I attended a deathbed of someone wracked with guilt by the idea that his dad, a slaughterhouse inspector, may have been signing off on TB-infected beef. I’ve read one solarpunk anthology story where a middle-aged son is going over the climate tax death dues for his father’s lifestyle. The story didn’t match my version of noir at all. It explored the theme of coming to terms rather than guilt, but the premise could be the seed of a more noirish solaprunk tale.
Finally, some solarpunk writers might engage with hard, sociological science fiction. What is accepted by society now that might be a future source of guilt? The (cyberpunk) Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick (2020) has ‘Fartburger’ as an insult for reactionary meat-eaters.
The cli-fi tale A Full Life by Paolo Bacigalupi describes a North American child climate refugee listening to their aunt’s stories of flying to Ibiza and ‘hating her just a little’. What secrets lurk in people’s past? What does it say about the story setting if behaviours have changed that much?
In conclusion, we have looked at my interpretation of noir in context down the years as well as existing solarpunk short stories that are circling noir themes. We’ve also pulled on those threads to imagine stories that might take that further.
The creative tension between sunnier futures and grim, even noirish pasts looks fruitful. It’s clearly only a tiny subset of the stories to be told in the solarpunk genre but might be one worth chasing down, through the dark rain and the faint scent of perfume lingering in the night.
What do you think?
Do you think solarpunk can be noir?
Do you agree with Cromyln’s interpretation of the genre?
What do you think the difference is between noir and hard-boiled detective stories?
Have you read any of the stories he mentions? What do you think of his analysis of them?
Would you like to see more solarpunk fiction with darker themes in them?
Let us know in the comments below.
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See you in the sunshine,
Alex Holland
Founder, SolarPunk Stories