Environmental sustainability and collective responsibility in Anglophone solarpunk fiction: A critical utopian approach to strategic foresight in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Renewable energy can change the material basis of a society without changing who is entitled to shape its future. This article examines that discrepancy through a critical utopian reading of three Anglophone solar-futures stories: Brenda Cooper’s “For the Snake of Power,” Andrew Dana Hudson’s “Under the Grid,” and Cat Rambo’s “Big Rural.” Drawing on Tom Moylan’s account of critical utopia and Ruth Levitas’s conception of utopia as method, it considers how narrative perspective, spatial organisation, and closure expose tensions between environmental improvement and collective responsibility. The argument is that solarpunk becomes useful to strategic foresight when its desirable futures remain open to disagreement, especially about essential services, the distribution of maintenance work, and the authority to revise collective decisions. The article develops an interpretive procedure for bringing these questions into Saudi sustainability deliberation without treating American fictional settings as evidence about Saudi society. Sustainable Development Goals 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, and 15 provide the environmental scope, while the Saudi National Water Strategy supplies a concrete contextual reference. The proposed procedure combines literary interpretation, contextual scrutiny, alternative scenario construction, and explicit tests of responsibility. Its contribution is a model of anticipatory reading in which the value of an imagined future depends partly on its capacity to accommodate those who cannot perform its preferred version of responsible citizenship. Literary plausibility, policy feasibility, and demonstrated public benefit remain separate standards of judgement.