Solarpunk’ is the term used to categorize fiction that speculates on post-radical-change life, and does so on the assumption that there will be survival, however radically changed. It is fundamentally optimistic about the continuation of human life, and life with a ‘civilized’ aspect; that is, concerned with more than brute survival. In Another Life, Ulibarri presents a very convincing vision of how the post-climate-collapse society organizes itself materially. The circumstance presented is of a community established after the planned flooding of Death Valley.

The need for an alternative way to live became pressing after Thomas Ramsey’s Planet B project failed spectacularly. His plan, and its collapse, is indicative of the sort of grand scale, grand theft, great lie consumer capitalism that preceded the social as well as climate collapse from which the Otra Vida community arose. There is no real presentation of the kinds of structures that make people like Ramsey possible, so he comes across as a ‘Big Bad’, a sui generis villain rather than the logical extreme of a particular, and profoundly complex, set of priorities, assumptions, and indulgences.

There are two storylines in Another Life, one personal and one political. The former concerns the implications of a scientific discovery, and the second arises from ideological conflicts.
The discovery itself is a clever one, based on theorizing a holographic universe, and on reincarnated material having unique markers that can be genetically tracked under certain circumstances. The storyline arises from implications of reincarnation—what your previous life implies about your current self—which feel naïve, rather than profound. A significantly more interesting possibility—a human reincarnated from animal, a human with past experience but no experience of being a human—is raised, but resolved only in terms of human emotion.

The Otra Vida community experiences some conflict with police, and with opposing ideologies from those outside, but there is no sense of actual threat. We see plenty of evidence of fair-mindedness in the community, of capacity for reflection and an impulse to honesty. But there is none of the sort of dogged, tough-minded persistence that, being necessary to push through any kind of unpopular change even at domestic rather than global scales, must surely be a characteristic required to sustain radical change within a radically destabilized society.

It is this that gives Another World a specifically utopian, rather than purely speculative, feel: it isn’t that the possibility of such a community under significantly altered circumstances feels unconvincing, it is that everyone is so nice about it. In twenty years, there has been only one ‘rival’ for Galacia’s role of Mediator. The worst anyone inside Otra Vita does is kill a hornet, and even they are just ‘crass’. All the real threats are outside. A utopian slant is not a criticism, but it does not come across as well-secured.

One thing that is oddly lacking is any depiction of the landscape after the Oil to Water Project flooded Death Valley. There is a reference, during the backstory of the community, to the positive environmental impact, the possibility of increasing biodiversity, and of ameliorating the decline of desert wetlands. These are never mentioned again. The focus is very much on human survival. This is not to suggest that a work of fiction is responsible for addressing the implication of every circumstance it describes. At the same time, there is here arguably a perpetuation of the sort of anthropocentrism that is at the heart of our current crisis (or crises).

What works very well is the development of the Otra Vida community and its practices, which are closely bound to structures familiar from contemporary society. The ways of surviving massive temperature increases seem reassuringly likely: reading as practical implementations, or logical extensions of, alternatives already at least theoretically possible. The community is very thoroughly planned and clearly presented, the characters are both human and humane; as a whole, the Otra Vida reads like a very realistic manifestation of Galacia’s motto “Their way of life wasn’t built for us, so we built another life.”