The Case For Heliosail
I didn't start working on Heliosail to send any kind of message or make ideological speech. I just liked the aesthetic of solarpunk, and I wanted something fun and lighthearted with pirates and cool stuff. As I worked on the game, though, I began to feel more and more that what I was creating was actually something kind of important.
I love post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk and dystopian stuff. The problem with it, is that it's often pretty depressing when you think about it too long. Even the sillier and more lighthearted things, like Fallout, feel really bleak really fast when you think about what the reality of living in such a world would be like. Starvation, radiation, zombies, mutated monsters. Through it all, there is this underlying assumption that humanity just really fucked the world up, and broke it for ourselves, and now we live with the consequences of what we did, constantly fighting for our lives and camping in squalor.
Don't get me wrong. In a game, that's a fun time.
Heliosail is technically post apocalyptic, even if that's not where the emphasis lies and it’s not the genre I would place it in. Earth is no longer inhabitable because of pollution and climate change, but people are working to fix it. There's a social interest in undoing the damage that was done and making it so that people can walk on the surface of Earth again without wearing environmental suits, and even though there's too many humans for everyone to live there now, maybe some people could.
I started to look at this and take comfort in it. The thought that maybe in the future, even if we fuck up now, we could come back and fix our mistakes... it's like a pressure valve for me.
I think fiction is extremely important to society. Dramatic depictions of what happens when we allow our dark impulses, like capitalism, greed, selfishness, violence, and lust for power, to get out of control, serve as a warning to us. They are also an expression of our collective anxiety and fears about these things. These stories give us a safe way for us to work through these feelings, by imagining what it would be like to live in such a future, and finding a way to be okay with that. We identify with the heroes trying to fight against it all and find meaning and emotion in their struggle. We root for them, we love to see them succeed, and some part of us feels like everything will be ok.
Fiction also sets our expectations for the future. We're all still looking forward to seeing the flying cars promised to us by the 50s and 60s, after all. More practically speaking, a lot of scientific and technological advances end up happening because someone saw something in science fiction and decided they wanted to make it real. There's a kind of feedback loop, where we create science fiction to express our ideas about the future, and those ideas influence what we think is possible and ultimately what the future is actually like.
Because of all of this, I started to feel really strongly that what Heliosail was becoming was something that could have a positive impact on the world around me. I wanted to show a different kind of future than the ones I usually see; one that was optimistic, but still felt realistic and achievable even from the place we are now.
Heliosail is a possible future where humanity failed to stop climate change and save our planet, but still managed to rise and overcome that. We spread across the solar system, we got our shit together, and we're turning around and coming back to repair our mistakes. There is an optimistic tone, an assumption that one day we will fix Earth, and that as a society this is something we want to do and can make happen.
Utopias do not exist. To achieve a "real" solarpunk future we have to work hard, and we'll have to keep working hard for the rest of time. We'll never create a perfect society that is fair and equitable for everyone and has no problems, but that doesn't mean trying has to feel like an impossible hill we'll never summit. In dystopian and cyberpunk worlds, even if the hero wins at the end of the day, there's a dark shadow that hangs over them. They may have won the battle, but the war was lost before they were ever born. In such a context, the ongoing work of bettering society feels a little like our daily 9-5 grind. Thankless work we have no choice but to do, even if we feel like we never see a real benefit. In these settings, this work fuels the narrative of crushing struggle that defined the genres.
Since that ongoing work is so necessary to a better society, and is never ending, I wanted to show that it doesn't have to feel like this. Yes, the work is never done, utopias don't exist, and there will always be people out there seeking to take advantage of a situation for their own gain...
...but fighting all that? That could be a swashbuckling adventure, where you cast off the shackles of your old life, be whoever you want to be, stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before you and paved a world that set you up to win, and forge a new life as a pirate and adventurer in space.
Welcome to the Sol System.
