In a future Phoenix, a woman named Rosa works with a maintenance AI for a large solar-power company that provides power to the city. When temperatures rise to dangerous heights, the city runs out of power, and it struggles to maintain life-saving air conditioning units. Rosa soon learns that 20 percent of the grid’s power is being diverted to wealthier cities, and she makes the decision to blow the whistle. With the help of her community, coworkers, and AI, they take back their power.

Power, both figurative and literal, is at the center of this story, “For the Snake of Power,” by Brenda Cooper, and is the prevailing theme of a new anthology of solarpunk fiction. In Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso, each of the fourteen stories delivers an important message: The creation of a better future requires collective action, so that people can regain their individual power.

“Even if it is neither possible nor desirable to create perfect worlds,” Verso writes in his introduction, “this does not mean we should be scared to imagine a better future, especially when the fight against inequality and environmental pollution puts it within our reach.” Solarpunk is a relatively new genre in science fiction, and this book is a great place to get to know it. As a genre, solarpunk concerns itself with better futures, especially those that are near and possible, through opposition to the powerful inhuman and inhumane forces that subjugate people. These forces include, according to Verso, “financial speculation, environmental externalization, predictive algorithms, the privatization of public property and services, and the prejudicial filters of AIs.”

Verso’s own story, “The Maestro of Small Things,” translated from Italian by Sally McCorry, may be one of the most satiating solarpunk stories I’ve read in a while. Verso describes a futuristic China, in prose that harkens to early solarpunk, when it existed only in printed zines and passion-project presses: “The city of Chongqing is like an urban membrane with tentacles spreading across dozens of hills, a tangle of streets and people impossible to unravel and separate. An enthralling knot where pollution has vanished. The hovering orange cloud blocking out the sun’s rays is no longer there; in its place a dense damp mist comes down at night and dissipates like a daily theatre curtain come morning.” This is the future a woman named Shi must navigate when she returns to China from Italy to visit her dad, an ag-tech entrepreneur. Shi begins working with her father’s android companion to record traditional Guizhou songs, until she runs afoul of an aggressive businessman looking to expand his AI farming company.

These and other stories are not dystopic. While similar genres imagine the horrors of rampant capitalism, urbanization, and mass industry, solarpunk envisions a future that is anticapitalist, de-urbanized, and thriving within a circular economy. But inside these big ideas are stories with heart. In them, we are asked to sympathize with androids, marry mutual aid with technology to tackle systems of oppression, and consider more sustainable sources of protein (In D.K. Mok’s story, “The Spider and the Stars,” crickets, mealworms, and silkworms become integral meal ingredients.)

Even though the stories are hopeful, they aren’t blind to the complexities of the world. In Ciro Faienza’s “The Soma Earth,” Tiche and Paolo have built a farm on Paolo’s family’s land in Gargano, Italy, desperate for a better future. They use advanced technology to amend barren soil, and it seems to be working until tragedy strikes. Ultimately, Tiche, who is African, is forced to consider the legacy of colonialism, even as it plays out on her farm, destroying the land and driving people from it. “It was like this, she thought,” Faienza writes, “dried resin of coffee rings the bottom of the finished cup; you rinse it and smell the ghosts of what you drank. Feeling the cut again when you change the bandage. The exhaustion that waits for the moment you try to stand.”

Against this exhaustion, Tiche chooses to move on, knowing that one day the land will be able to heal itself if just left alone. It is a difficult decision, but ultimately a selfless one. And it leaves a powerful message. Better futures demand much of us, though not always through bold action. Sometimes the courageous, quiet decisions are the things that matter most.