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Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures is an anthology of speculative fiction edited by Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, Sarena Ulibarri, and Rajat Chaudhuri. A 2021 Scroll.in feature describes it as a collection of solarpunk stories mostly from the Asia-Pacific region, using hopeful futures to explore urban life shared by humans and other species.
What the anthology is about
The book at the center of Sayantani Sengupta’s October 5, 2021 feature is Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures—not a book titled after the feature’s headline. Its distinctive focus is the city as a place where human communities, other species, and ecological systems meet. The feature also notes that the collection’s contributions come mostly from the Asia-Pacific, a region it describes as underrepresented in solarpunk.
The Scroll.in article introduces solarpunk as an emerging genre in science fiction and the arts, oriented toward greener, more hopeful futures. In its framing, cooperation, community, ingenuity, connectedness, decentralisation, renewable energy, equity, and justice are among the ideas associated with the movement. These are useful guideposts, not a single definition shared by every writer.
How the stories make hopeful futures concrete
The feature discusses several stories as examples of the anthology’s ecological and social concerns. They are selected examples, not a complete contents list.
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- Andrew Dana Hudson’s “The Mammoth Steps” explores kinship and connection across species.
- Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s “Listen: A Memoir” considers language and the more-than-human world.
- Natalka Roshak’s “By the Light of the Stars” connects turtles with the problem of light pollution.
- DA Xiaolin Spires’s “The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats” follows a science-fair project intended to help seabirds.
Together, these examples make the urban-future premise tangible: the city is not only human infrastructure, but also habitat and a network of relationships. The stories’ hopeful orientation does not require ignoring environmental problems; it can instead ask what people might do in response to them.
Hope in solarpunk does not mean avoiding politics
The contributors interviewed by Sengupta do not offer one uniform account of the genre. Roshak describes it this way: “Within science fiction, solarpunk is a literature of solutions.” That phrase captures an emphasis on possibility, but it need not imply that social or ecological conflicts have easy answers.
Hudson says his speculative ideas are often more political than technological. His view also complicates the assumption that advanced technology must reinforce concentration of power: “High tech doesn’t just have to mean more power or more data or more computation all in the hands of a few big companies.” In this account, the question is not simply what technology can do, but who shapes it and who benefits.
The feature also raises the care required when stories draw on Indigenous knowledge. Editor Christoph Rupprecht warns: “Indigenous wisdom is not a resource to exploit for storytelling or worldbuilding.” His comment places a boundary around worldbuilding: attention to ecological relationships should not turn Indigenous knowledge into material detached from its people and context.
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The named anthology and its editors are identified in the 2021 feature, but that article does not establish the book’s current edition, price, stock, or retailer availability. Check a current bookseller or publisher listing for those details. The feature is best read as an introduction to the collection’s themes and contributors, rather than a current buying guide or a comprehensive catalogue of its stories.
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