Wings of Renewal, what lies beyond the dragons in this Solarpunk anthology
One might say that it gives some idea of the progress, made by women engineers, of #ILookLikeAnEngineer; the constant references to solar panels, a new wild West that it so west it is almost East narrated in anime style, lush green planets and low-fi districts of megalopoli, timid Sapphic kisses and unshakeable friendships, together with a diverse variety of dragons, reminiscent of those cupboards we fill with stuff we don’t know where to put.
“Wings of Renewal”, a collection of women’s short stories edited by Claudie Arseneault and Brenda J. Pierson, has given us back the vox populi from the time of Wattpad and CGI blockbusters.
The stories are a recognisable offspring of the fandom culture, each seemingly aspiring to become the structure of a film waiting for the action scenes — of the director’s choosing — to be added, and the primacy of the visual component and identification with the characterisation of the characters is expressed throughout. One might say that the text form is just the first step that the authors contemplated when creating their universes: it would be fascinating to integrate the text with matte paintings of the settings, a cast of possible protagonists, a playlist, several reposted images from Tumblr and Behance accounts, a few GIF reactions. Each story comes across as being an extremely coherent theme park, in which the rides have been built while keeping in mind a future of hope, tolerance, respect, the predestination of the protagonist and the mastery of a technique into which we would like to project ourselves.
And then there are the dragons: whether they are pets in need of protection in the classic poacher / veterinarian juxtaposition, or the animal spirit of spaceships, whether they are the form we give to our true essence or magical matter-transforming machines, in a world that is so illuminated and in focus, dragons perhaps represent a trace of good old fashioned humanity, one that was capricious and deficient, able to surprise us by leaving the parameters of political correctness, connecting the dots, making it rain, giving us a kiss when we thought we had messed everything up, saving us and giving us that thrill once more. One might say, the human part.
