This month, 706 Youth Space, in collaboration with Warm Night Studio, will host Italian science fiction writer and Solarpunk: The Future is Bright chief editor Francesco Verso, together with the Chinese-edition curator Lisa Zhuang, and Science fiction translator and editor Vera,
in Chiang Mai, with a simultaneous online livestream, opening a dialogue on the future of science fiction through the lens of solarpunk.
Their conversation will explore the evolution of sci-fi subgenres, and the pathways from literary imagination to film and screen adaptation.
In an era where apocalypse narratives dominate contemporary imagination—
where capital turns catastrophe into narrative fuel,
and technological rationality shapes disaster into an extension of algorithms—
Solarpunk attempts to reclaim the very idea of the future from the ruins.
It does not begin with destruction,
but with coexistence, renewal, and regeneration.
After the cold gleam of cyberpunk,
solarpunk restores an ethical dimension between humans and nature within science fiction.
It rejects fatalistic end-of-the-world narratives,
and it also rejects empty utopias.
Technology is no longer a tool of conquest,
but a medium and ecosystem for mutual flourishing.
The city is no longer a forest of steel,
but a hybrid ecology of sunlight and living plants.
The future it envisions is organic, decentralized, and ecological—
a world where technology and nature co-evolve,
a civilization built upon the shared agency of humans and their environment.
The storytelling of the future should not belong solely to technological elites.
It is a collective labor shared by all who can imagine “another world.”
As Francesco Verso writes:
“Imaginer le futur, c’est déjà commencer à le construire!”
To imagine the future is already to begin building it.
The future is shaped not merely by invention,
Italian science fiction writer and publisher. Recipient of the Best Editor Award in Italy and the European Science Fiction Society’s Best Publisher Award.
Founder of Warm Night Studio. Science fiction editor and publisher working across literary curation, translation projects, and cross-cultural publishing.
Science fiction translator and editor. Her translated works include Beyond the Rift, Forward, and multiple other sci-fi titles.
