I am with you. I moved from writing short stories, poetry and novels into the writing science fiction for all the reasons you outline in your excellent article. I was very interested in the definition you draw between cyber and solar:

Cyberpunk:

• Economy dominated by large corporations
• Environment is usually wrecked, oppressive
• Powerful technology has created wealth gap
• Drugs used as escape from reality
• Man merging with machine
• Always raining

SolarPunk:

• Decentralized symbiotic economic structures
• Living in balance with environment
• Technology empowers the individual
• Drugs used to expand consciousness and augment reality
• Man working alongside machine
• Sunny with a chance of showers

I’m in the middle of a cyber punk/solar punk series — first book published by Double Dragon a couple of years ago, which you might like if you go to my site theburningyears.squarespace.com to get an idea of what it’s about. I wish you’d been the artist for the cover I absolutely love your graphic, genius.

I do believe that we will however remain with both the cyberpunk and the solar punk scenario. In my books the cyber punk creates the solar punk. In Book 1 most are living in a solar punk world underground because of the cyber punk. However as the series progresses and by the third book Tesla’s Dream, my characters move heavily into the solarpunk arena, with the help of a group of advanced extra terrestrials who hold out the possibility of a solar punk world.

However and this is the big question that faces all novelists —the nature of the human being and the archetypal conflict we’re all involved in. It’s the question most of us novelists try and answer, no matter what genre we’re in the question of who and what are we and where we’re going?

In the solar punk world there will always be the inescapable dynamic of our third world dimension — chaos vs. order.