Neon Riders

"I just finished this one, and it’s really interesting. I would put it with Implanted , because it’s a cyberpunk -solarpunk crossover. Neon Riders is maybe mid-future, around the turn of the next century, in a version of San Francisco that is futuristic and very sustainable. The characters are part of a bike gang: they ride these electric bikes, and they’re connected to an augmented reality. The term ‘neon riders’ comes from the fact that when they’re plugged into this augmented reality, they can see the speed that they’re going through colour stripes in cyberspace, which creates a very cool cyberpunk visual. There’s an AI that doesn’t run the city, but helps the people in the city. So there’s a lot of those science fiction, cyberpunk-type tropes. At the same time, it’s very community-focused. There are a lot of references to community gardens and rooftop gardens, and people growing their own food and making their own clothes. There’s a lot of focus on bike repair and the do-it-yourself movement, and repairing rather than replacing. And since San Francisco has a lot of fog, they’re harvesting water through fog harps that collect the dew and channel it into water that they can use. Things like that are just incorporated into the world-building throughout, so that it’s very clear that this is a sustainable community. But it’s not perfect – there’s a lot of conflict. It’s a fast-paced story, very like a thriller in its pacing, but taking place in this solarpunk world. Like The Lost Cause , it’s dealing with current political divides in the United States. You have a character who comes from outside the city, and arrives with the intention of stealing something from the city and taking it back to their rural community. But once they get into the city and learn how things really work, and how it’s different from what they’ve been told, they decide they want to stay. It’s a very ride-or-die situation, where the new community that this person has found is not willing to let him be taken back to the community he doesn’t want to go back to. Half of the book is a big car chase: the big Humvee from outside the city being chased by these bikes with their neon colours. It’s very fun, and it’s very conflict-driven, which some solarpunk definitely is not. It will appeal to people who like that faster-paced story, but it really gives a sense of a different type of future that we could move toward, and a different type of community that we could create. And that’s what solarpunk is really trying to do: it’s trying to show something on the other side of the dark tunnel we’re looking into with climate change. I chose solarpunk novels for this because there aren’t very many. Most solarpunk is short fiction , and I think that happens because a thought experiment tends to do well in the short fiction form. So there’s a lot of solarpunk short fiction out there. Anthologies that I edited include Glass and Gardens and Multispecies Cities , where we collected a lot of different visions and created a polyphonic chorus of voices about what this future could look like. There’s also Solarpunk Magazine and DreamForge magazine , and plenty of others that are publishing these kinds of stories, these visions in short form. So there are lots of solarpunk stories available that can be read in one sitting."