Challenging Solarpunk’s Technophilia through Degrowth Imaginaries in Julia K. Patt’s “Caught Root” and Linda Jordan’s “Reclaiming”

Although still in its infancy, the sci-fi subgenre of Solarpunk has become a popular aesthetic mode in today’s literary field, with an extensive corpus of short-story collections having been published during the late 2010s and early 2020s. These narratives tend to explore postcapitalist imaginaries through a technophilic lens, thus depicting the idea of possible futures in which high-technology and industrial development can become environmentally sustainable. Against these logics of techno-optimism, some rare literary pieces subvert the hegemonic conceptualization of the Solarpunk imagination, representing degrowth societies that highlight the idealization of greenified techno-futures. This article first introduces the notion of Solarpunk and briefly analyzes it through the lens of degrowth theory. It then explores two short stories by two US authors, Julia K. Patt’s “Caught Root” (2018) and Linda Jordan’s “Reclaiming” (2021), to show how they both create alternative low-tech futures neighboring Solarpunk cities. This essay focuses on how both authors’ narratives not only criticize Solarpunk’s mainstream assumptions, but also how they create alternative ecologic and economic spaces following degrowth rationalizations.