Tag Archives: Solarpunk

How Well Did I Predict Science Fiction this Year?

It’s the most embarrassing time of the year…when I judge how well I did at foretelling what types of science fiction books would be published this year.

In past years, I’ve tried and failed with crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot cards, astrology, palmistry, and ChatGPT, but last year at this time I used a sure-fire method—the Ouija Board. Let’s see how well I did:

Prediction: Climate Change and Solarpunk

Authors will give us post-apocalyptic, post-climate-disaster recovery stories with emerging solarpunk civilizations.

Assessment:

The Ouija Board did well here, and I found several examples, including:

  • All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall. Future glaciers have melted, flooding the earth and forcing people to live in the topmost floors of skyscrapers.  
  • Private Rites by Julia Armfield. An environmental crisis brings continuous, worldwide rain.  
  • Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. This book combines two previous stories, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, which take place in a far-future solarpunk utopia.

Prediction: Driverless Cars

Writers will show us the pros and cons of more advanced driverless cars than we have now.

Assessment:

The Ouija board called this category as well. These books drive on the dark/horror side of the road:

  • The Driverless: Phantom Wheels by Leonard Boblea Adrian. This horror story features an evil, driverless car.
  • An ICE-Y Ride: A Dystopian Tech Horror Short Story by TH Sterling. An autonomous car accuses its passenger of sedition and becomes her prison.

Prediction: Futurism Beyond Africa

While Afrofuturism will continue, we’ll see books exploring the future of other cultures and regions.

Assessment:

This didn’t seem as widespread as the Ouija board made it sound. I only found one example:

  • You Must Take Part in Revolution: A Graphic Novel by Badiucao and Melissa Chan. This is set in Hong Kong and Taiwan during a future war between the U.S. and China.

Prediction: Fact-ion

Scifi authors will combine their fiction with fact. That is, they’ll base a fictional tale on a true event.

Assessment:

Proving that Ouija boards aren’t all-knowing, I found no examples of this in 2025.

Prediction: Future Romance

Setting a romance novel in the future is fine, but in the coming year, authors will further explore how human relationships might change in the future. What bizarre, new kinds of relationships might emerge?

Assessment:

The board played it safe with this one. Anyone could’ve made this prediction for almost any year. I stopped looking for examples after finding these:

  • Useless: Male Superhero in a Reverse World by Strawman Context. A man finds himself in an alternate world where women far outnumber men and hold all the power.
  • A Future Undone: A Gay Sci-Fi Romance Thriller About Time Travel and Artificial Intelligence by Kurt Harding. The subtitle says it all.
  • The House That Learned Her Name by Wanda Miller. A grieving widow develops a relationship with her smart home.
  • Mated to the Possessive Cyborg: An Impreg Cyborg Sci-Fi Romance by Laura Cauldwell. Like Beauty and the Beast, only this beast is a troubled, military cyborg.

Prediction: Interacting With Readers

Remember choose-your-own-adventure books? In 2025, authors will find new ways to allow the reader to influence the story-reading experience.

Assessment:

Ouija boards are interactive by nature, and I got the impression my board enjoyed making this prediction. Here are some examples I found:

  • Unseen Archives Magazine: An Interactive Graphic Novel Experience by Anthony L Abraham. The more I read about this magazine, the less I understood, but it seems interactive.
  • Access The Bridge: A SciFi Choose-Your-Own-Path Adventure GameBook by Henry Butler. This goes beyond standard choose-your-own adventure books, since the wrong paths provide knowledge needed for other paths.
  • Lumen Calls: A Pathfinder Adventure by Gene Anders. A strange anomaly beckons near a small town. You, the reader, make choices, but each choice changes how the anomaly sees you.

Prediction: Linked Minds

Extrapolating the possibilities of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, writers will craft stories featuring human characters interfacing with computers via brain implants.

Assessment:

The Ouija board didn’t exactly go out on a limb in predicting more books with this long-time staple of science fiction, and authors obliged in 2025:

  • Virtuality by Derek Cressman. In the near future, everyone has brain implants providing infotainment, but there are side effects.
  • Veritas Dawn by Tal Azar. A pill upgrades people’s minds, and connects them. An algorithm emerges, but has its own agenda.

Prediction: Merged Worlds

Pairs of authors will collaborate on novels that combine characters and worlds developed separately and previously by each writer.

Assessment:

These are a type of what are called Crossovers, and the Ouija board failed with this one. I found no examples.

Prediction: Quality AI Fiction

In the coming year, an AI will write a good science fiction book.

Assessment:

I thought for sure the board nailed this, and I did find examples of books written with AI assistance, but no verified AI solo performances this year.

Conclusion

I find the Ouija board a little creepy, and of dubious value in predicting the near future of scifi. I’ve picked a much better prognostication tool, and next week I’ll reveal my spot-on predictions for science fiction in 2026. First, I foresee you’ll check back for next week’s post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 21, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

Looking Back, My 2023 Predictions Assessed

We’ve arrived at that time of year again, when I judge how well I did at this time last year in foretelling the attributes of science fiction books in 2023.

In past years, I’ve tried various techniques, but this time I used a sure-fire method—palm reading. Let’s see how well I did:

  • Prediction: Artificial Intelligence. A continuing trend, yes, but in 2023, we’ll see a twist. Authors will get past the Frankenstein reruns and the cute-robot-is-nobler-than-humans plot. Novels will show us more sophisticated AI, computers with a different order of intelligence, one alien to us.
  • Prediction: Classics redone in LGBTQ. Authors will explore the contours of the LGBTQ realm by rewriting classic tales, but repopulating them with LGBTQ characters.
  • Prediction: Private Space Flight. I jumped the gun, er, rocket, in predicting this for 2022. 2023 is the year we’ll see spaceships funded by billionaires without government involvement, for better or worse.
    • Assessment: It took some hunting, but I found what might be an example. Skeleton Crew by HT Aaron appears to involve private space flight, though I may be wrong about that.
  • Prediction: Terraforming. Once seen as an extension of man’s dominion over Earth, terraforming will show its warts in 2023. We’ll see stories of botched terraforming, opposed terraforming, and weaponized terraforming.

Before you congratulate me on my foresight (I know you were about to), maybe you shouldn’t credit my palmistry skills. What’s really improved is my after-the-fact ability to find books that fulfilled my prophesies. For those prediction assessments that cite only one or two examples, it’s clear I didn’t forecast a major trend.

I made no personal predictions last year about how my own writing would fare in 2023. Probably a good thing I didn’t.

Watch this space next week to see my spot-on predictions for the world of science fiction in 2024. Considering my past track record, the law of averages says you’ll be amazed at the prognosticating prowess of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 24, 2023Permalink

8 Science Fiction Predictions for 2019

You’ve been wondering where the genre of Science Fiction will be going in 2019, haven’t you? I knew it. You’ve landed at the right blog post.

Author with CRISTAL Ball

How do I know the future, you ask? Do I have a crystal ball? No. That would be irrational and silly. I have a CRISTAL ball, a Computerized Recursive and Iterative Stabilizing Trend ALgorithm, which I packaged in a spherical shape for optimized computing speed.

Diagnostic checks are complete and the presets are accurate, so I’ll set parameters for 2019 and access the graphical interface. Let me gaze into my CRISTAL ball…

  • In 2019, you’ll see more science fiction books written by authors from previously underrepresented groups (women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc.) and these books will explore concepts of belonging and isolation, as well as bending our current notions of gender and race.
  • The superhero theme in movies will peak and begin a gradual decline. It’s been an amazing ride, but I believe the market has saturated and audiences are getting tired.
  • Very few, if any, best-selling scifi books will feature faster-than-light drive. Most authors have accepted Einstein’s speed of light limit. FTL now seems hokey to readers.
  • Having already peaked, the steampunk and alternate history genres will continue to wane in books and movies, though they may retain strength in the video gaming world. This genre trend in books is troubling to me, since I enjoy writing steampunk and other alternative history.
  • We’ll see more Solarpunk, and the Punk Family will grow by a few more. I think there’s a great deal of uncharted territory in the solarpunk genre and a general hunger for it among readers. Most new ‘punks’ added in 2019 will be future-based, rather than alternative histories.
  • There will be fewer dystopian young adult books, and there will be an upsurge in YA depicting a positive (though not utopian) future. I think dystopias have run their course for the time being, and readers are ready for less bleak outlooks.
  • Overall, as a genre, science fiction will do well in the visual media of movies, video games, and graphic novels, but not in traditional book form. Plenty of authors enjoy writing scifi, but readers will turn away from this genre in greater numbers. This is another prediction I find personally disappointing.
  • The trend toward series novels will remain strong. Once modern readers make an emotional investment in a set of characters and their fictional world, they want to know what happens after the first novel, and after the next.

At the end of 2019, I intend to run a blog post confirming the accuracy of my CRISTAL ball. In the meantime, you can tell everyone you’ve glimpsed the future, as predicted by —

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 30, 2018Permalink

The Dawning of Solarpunk

The Punk Family just keeps on growing! Its new addition is Solarpunk, a subgenre and movement pointed out to me by a kind fan on Facebook.

The Punk Family

The Punk Family started with Cyberpunk, which spawned a series of literary subgenres. Of those, the most popular is Steampunk (a favorite of mine). Most of them are marked by a prime mover, an energy source or main motivating agent, that is part of each one’s name. They all incorporate a ‘punk’ aspect, that is, that at least one character rebels against some aspect of society. Finally, each one comes with its own décor, or visual style and clothing design.

As near as I can determine, Solarpunk started with a post by Olivia Louise in 2014. She envisioned a world of renewable, sustainable, ecological green energy where people are closer to the earth and specialize as craftspeople and artisans. She proposed an aesthetic along Art Nouveau lines.

Others took up this theme and incorporated related threads of thought into Solarpunk, including:

  • Transcendence beyond war, aggressive violence, and scarcity;
  • A culture celebrating ethnic and sexual diversity and inclusion;
  • A decentralized society, including micro-farming, with individuals not dependent on a commercial, global economy to furnish their needs;
  • A technology level we already have; no new breakthroughs required; and
  • Glass structures and ubiquitous solar cells.

Solarpunk is a reaction against a society marked by the burning of fossil fuels, hierarchal political arrangements, corporate greed, global warming, intolerance of marginalized groups, capitalism, and globalism. That, of course, is the ‘punk’ aspect of Solarpunk.

Given this description, you can understand the appeal of this movement. A quick internet search for ‘solarpunk’ reveals beautiful designs incorporating flowers and other plants, and utopian depictions of a near future within our reach.

Some great descriptions of the Solarpunk movement include posts by Connor Owens, Adam Flynn, and Ben Valentine. Goodreads has a list of Solarpunk literature here.

Solarpunk is still blossoming and forming itself. Its literary landscape is rather sparse, and there’s a clear demand for more Solarpunk stories. This represents a new and potentially fruitful opportunity if you’re a writer of fiction, like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 6, 2018Permalink