Implanted

"Implanted is a far-future, climate fiction, solarpunk novel. It takes place in a domed city that was built to protect people from extreme weather caused by climate change. The domed city is kind of ecologically or economically stratified: the rich people live at the top, where there’s a lot of light, and the poor people live down at the bottom, where it’s dark and they don’t have access to light. This is far-future, and people are starting to think about emerging from the dome, going back out into the world and braving the new weather and the new world out there. It’s a spy thriller. There’s somebody who’s smuggling information between the levels of the dome, and there’s intrigue and secrets and corruption. So it’s actually a very fast-paced, exciting spy story with the background of this ecological issue. Aesthetically, it’s very solarpunk. Solarpunk tends to have an art nouveau aesthetic, with a lot of green and a lot of earthy tones, and you really get that aesthetic through this book. There’s a grassroots uprising that the characters are participating in, which is a very important part of solar punk. It’s never a top-down approach, never waiting around for governments and corporations to do the right thing. It’s about collective action from the people, from the bottom up. In Implanted , because of the way that the city is structured, it is physically from the bottom up. It’s really amazing. It can be far-future, or near-future, or anywhere in between. It’s looking at the trajectory that happens if we make changes. We always see that chart of rising temperatures, the track we’re on… Solarpunk looks at what happens if we make a change and the trajectory goes differently. We can look at stories at the far end of that, and say, “Once we get through all of this, what does that world look like?” Or we can look at any point along the way. Some of the other books that I am going to talk about are much more near-future. If you’re looking at far-future, it can be more utopian – or utopian-ish! – where we have made it through all the struggle. Or you can look at the struggle along the way."