The Solarpunk Society
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You grew a way out.

Cybertime did not disappear. You changed enough of it to find the other timeline hiding underneath.

Front cover of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope by GingerbeardSpine of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of HopeBack cover of The Solarpunk Society, including the book description and barcode
Showing the front cover.

The book is not a prize behind a paywall. It is the map you came here for.

THE SOLARPUNK SOCIETY / CHOOSE HOW YOU COME IN

Walk in through the game — or take the back door.

This is the home of The Solarpunk Society. You can play a short journey from Cybertime to Solartime — walk a grey, locked-down street and bring it back to life — or slip through the back door straight to the site. Either way you end up here. Take the back door and we won't ask again — and the Play the game link in the menu brings the gateway back whenever you want.

01 / Play it · about 3 minutesEnter the Cybertime → Solartime gatewayDig, plant, clear and free a dead street back to life. No skills needed — just walk it, and answer a few questions along the way.

No account. No tracking. No punishment for taking the easy door.

Worn out fighting what you are against — and still no clear picture of what you are for? This book is a warm, sweary invitation to picture it together.

Early access opens 1 October for the email list and Telegram community. Public launch: 3 November.

Proudly not sold on Amazon

That sticker is on the printed cover, not just the website. It is not a marketing quirk. It is the whole argument of the book, printed on the outside of it.

One shop owns the shelf

Around nine in ten ebooks sold in Britain go through Kindle, and Amazon takes the largest share of print sales too. When a single company controls the shelf, it stops being a shop and becomes a gatekeeper: it sets the price, it owns the reviews, it decides what you are shown — and it can make any book disappear overnight without telling anyone why. That is not a market. That is a tollbooth with a search bar.

The 70% that is really 35%

Amazon pays a writer 70% only if they price inside the band Amazon chose. Step outside it and the rate halves to 35% — for the same book, the same work, the same reader. Then it bills you a delivery fee, per megabyte, for the crime of putting pictures in your own book. Nobody negotiated those terms. They were handed down.

Writers are being starved out

Median earnings for a professional author in the UK have collapsed to roughly£7,000 a year (ALCS, 2022) — well under minimum wage for full-time work. You cannot write a serious book on that. So serious books stop getting written, and the people who can still afford to write are the people who were already rich. That is not a talent shortage. It is a squeeze, and it is deliberate.

The slop is already here

In 2023 Amazon had to cap uploads at three books per day, per account, because the store was drowning in machine-written titles, and started forcing authors to declare AI content. This is what a market looks like when the only thing being optimised is volume: writing turned into the fast food of literature — cheap, everywhere, engineered to be swallowed without tasting. Every slop title buries a real one.

So this book is not sold there. Not listed, not advertised, not a penny of it to Amazon, Meta or Google. Buying it here is a small, deliberate act of desertion from the Big C cult — the monopolies wringing the creative blood out of us for one more cent of billionaire profit. You are not renting a licence from a corporation that can delete it. You are buying a book off a person in Glasgow, and it is yours for good.

Front cover of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope by GingerbeardSpine of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of HopeBack cover of The Solarpunk Society, including the book description and barcode
Showing the front cover.

The Solarpunk Society / public mini edition

This mini edition contains three chapter extracts plus a two-page teaser from the flagship title chapter.

Contents

Three chapters.
One sharp teaser.

This is a curated preview, not a continuous edition. Read the three chapter extracts in full, then take the two-page Single Blade of Hope teaser when you are ready.

Contents

Get the book

Not out yet

Community pioneers read it from 1 October

The book goes public on 3 November. Join the email list or Telegram community for the first distribution window on 1 October — no charge, no tiers, no waiting-list theatre. The delivery route is confirmed before any book is sent.

Join by emailJoin Telegram

What is this thing?

A blueprint for a better Scotland, disguised as a very sweary pub story.

A guy named GINGERBEARD tripped out his SOLARTIME reality and landed up here, naked in a bed like some ginger-pubed Terminator. SOLARTIME — the Scotland where people voted for their own independence and ended up building something much bigger than any national border could contain. Problem is nobody on this CYBERTIME believed his incoherent ADHD rants. So confused and frustrated, he wrote this book.

What comes out is part daft comedy, part testimony, and part instruction manual — money that arrives without a means test, politicians picked out of a hat, food grown and energy generated where people actually live, towns and cities handed back to the folk in them. Every bit of it costed, argued, and stolen from somewhere it already works.

It is not yet another warning about the future. Apocalypse porn got boring! It is a stubborn, funny, detailed answer to alright then, what would you do instead? More than that — it is a challenge to you and me personally: why the fuck aren't we building it already!?

Proscribed object 41-B

A book so dangerous, we banned the thought of its very existence.

Some reprobate and serious thought criminal claims he woke up here from a different timeline where Scotland didn't need an army of cops, politicians and judges with silly wigs. Next he will be telling us free food can grow on trees! Instead of seeking mandatory psychiatric help and sectioning himself, he wrote this gobbledygook down. Six hundred pages of non-stop thought crimes. Four officers were sent, on separate occasions, on different continents, to ask him to burn the manuscript and never speak of it again. He made them tea and gave them vegan cake. Two of them stayed for a second helping. This has been noted in the officer's files.

The Big C Cult has rated this supposed book object MAXIMUM BIOHAZARD — our second-highest rating, after CATASTROPHICALLY CALAMITOUS, which we are saving in case he tries to write a follow-up. The book makes free money, free food and free time for all citizens sound achievable, which they are obviously not, because a board of people much smarter than you said so, in a document we have classified. For your own safety.

Trust us! You do not want to read this book! It has ruined the eyes of four inspectors. Two had to quit and have taken up permaculture gardening! One even talks to his neighbours and people on the bus now. The Bureau accepts no liability for any of this and expects its inspectors back to their desks, fit for work by Friday.

Worst of all, this GINGERBEARD chancer is GIFTING the ebook away for free to those stupid enough to turn their brains to hippified mush! He refused to publish or promote it with any of our vetted and infiltrated traditional publishers OR on the platforms of our dear leaders like the holy Amazon, or the venerable Meta or the almighty Google. That's how it slipped through our moderator's fingers! That's why we had to add this second view on his home page. So you can see the truth. The TRUTH we take care of and provide for you! DO NOT BUY THIS NON-EXISTENT BOOK!

Read it now

One doorway into the final printed book — a new one every month.

Try the real thing before anyone asks you for a penny, an email address, or a favour.

Hazardous reading material

DANGER! NOT FOR THE EYES OF CHILDREN, WOMEN, ANIMALS OR THE MENTALLY WEAK

One chapter for the unconvinced. The other two are being withheld for your safety.

We know how reverse psychology works. We at the Big C Cult INVENTED it in the first place. So to prove to you how horrendous this non-existent banned book really is, we have provided one example for you. The remaining exhibits were removed after our inspectors began enjoying them. Warning, your eyes may start to itch and bleed if you open this link. We do not advise you to do it. It is only for those stupid enough to not follow the advice of those who are clearly much more intelligent than you. Exposure may affect your posture towards your life value, your standing at work, and the very fabric of the proud culture we fed you since birth. If you must look, look through your fingers, make lots of tutting sounds throughout and report yourself afterwards. Failure to report yourself is itself reportable, by you, about you, to us. Self reporting form B-11 is available at all desks in every direction.

Play the minigame

A wee 3D game from the book's world, while you wait for November.

A tiny 3D game built from the book's world — no download, no sign-up, runs in the browser. The loading screen below is the last quiet moment you get.

The minigame's opening screen — a rainy Cybertime alley, the Solar Bloom story card and its Walk it buttonEnter the minigame →
  1. 01

    Walk a dead grey street

    WASD or the arrow keys on a laptop, a thumb pad on a phone. You are GINGERBEARD, and all you have is two hands and a spade.

  2. 02

    Dig, plant, clear, free

    Nothing on the street gets better by force. Answer the questions the people who built it would rather you did not ask — everything you get right turns green behind you, and stays green.

  3. 03

    Win, and this website changes

    Finish it and the whole site flips to Solartime and stays there. That is the only way to switch it permanently without touching the toggle up top.

Play it now — no download, no sign-up

Lines worth carrying

Four lines from the book.

A fictional orange-haired character writing above a sunlit future city

Freedom needs somewhere to stand.

“We realised that true freedom isn’t just the right to say no; it’s the right to say no without it ruining the rest of your life.”

Prohibited evidence / handle through fingers

Forbidden quotes bureau.

Four lines from the book that may cause your head to explode if you say them more than three (3) times, or backwards while standing on your head. Any such mention of the Big C Cult by any citizen less intelligent than us will lead to a programme of mandatory re-consumerification.

A fictional hooded citizen watched by police drones under a banner reading YOU ARE FREE (TO DO AS WE TELL YOU)

Cult admits strategy in internal memo. Memo denies everything.

“The Big C Cult relies on us feeling powerless and doomed.”

A Tale of Two Timelines

Nine places. Nine choices.

These matched views ask one question: who is this place for?

A Tale of Two Timelines / evidence Cybertime is better!

Nine alternative worldviews presented in the book.

Observe the alleged outcomes of shelter, repair, shared power and ordinary public joy. CLEARLY our cybertime is better! We all know acid rain is good for the skin and that The Bureau handles your freedom much better than you ever could. Without us, who is going to feed you your favourite pills in the morning? Who is going to make your favourite chat show, or soap opera? We will keep all nasty foreign ideas and people away from our pure blood and culture. Purity is strength!

Fictional Cybertime island harbour polluted by industrial wasteFictional Solartime island harbour, with community vessels, clean water and renewable energy

01 / Harbour

Steal this book

Copying is the point. Escape the tollbooth.

We are not being cute. Every word of that is meant literally.

Anti-duplication bulletin

Please do not copy this book.

The table below is reproduced only so that loyal consumers may witness the horror of a writer who has not been squeezed. Column three is legal, which is the difficulty. Avert your eyes at the earliest opportunity.

Sharing a book used to be called lending. Now it gets called theft — by companies who would rather rent you a licence they can delete than sell you something you own. If that is what stealing means now, then fine: steal this book. Here is exactly how.

  1. 01

    Download it for nothing

    From launch day, the complete book — ePub and PDF, no DRM, no sign-up, no email address. Not a sample. The whole thing.

  2. 02

    Pay what it is worth to you

    If it was worth something, settle up afterwards. If it was not, or you are skint, that is a complete answer and nobody is chasing you for it.

  3. 03

    Paperbacks at cost for the skint

    Activists, community groups, reading circles, prisons and anyone genuinely broke: ask, and the print edition goes out at cost. No form, no means test — just ask.

  4. 04

    Seed the torrent

    We seed it ourselves. Copy it, upload it, hand it round on a memory stick. There is no piracy problem here because there is nobody left to sue.

None of this is a growth hack with a free tier at the end of it. A book that cannot be passed to a pal is not really yours, and a writer who cannot afford to write the next one is not really a writer. The second half of that sentence is the wider plan — see how Village Publishing works.

The accused has published a list of ways to obtain his book without paying. We reproduce it here solely so that loyal consumers may recognise the offence on sight. Do not perform any of the following four actions.

  1. 01

    He simply gives it away

    The entire book. No payment. No account. No email harvested for later. Our monetisation team has been sent home for the day.

  2. 02

    The price is a suggestion

    You may pay less. You may pay nothing. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no enforcement department. There is nothing to enforce.

  3. 03

    Free paper for the broke

    Activists, prisons and the openly skint receive the physical object at cost. He does not check. He simply believes them.

  4. 04

    He seeds the torrent himself

    We have no legal response to this. There is no victim to represent. Our piracy division has quietly closed the file and gone for a lie down.

A book that can be handed to a friend cannot be measured, throttled, repriced or switched off. This is not a business model. This is a hole where a business model should be.

Watch it instead

Six hundred pages is a big ask. These are not.

Short explainers that take one idea out of the book and get to the point — a citizen's dividend, politicians picked by lot, what happens when neighbours actually organise.

See all the explainers

Before launch

Be in the community before it opens.

Early access

Join by email

Join the pioneer list for the first distribution window on 1 October.

The community

Join Telegram

Join the reader and builder community before the public launch — talk to each other, not just to him.

Both doors lead to the same community — and the point of it is each other: folk answering questions, arguing kindly and sharing what they build, not just a line to Gingerbeard. Bring a question, an argument, or a half-built beautiful thing.

Both doors lead to the same community, in which strangers help each other for free. Free! DISGUSTING!

Counting down

Early access opens

Mailing list and Telegram community first.

  1. 23Days
  2. 03Hours
  3. 50Minutes
  4. 21Seconds

1 October — early access for the mailing list and Telegram community.3 November — public launch.

Two feeds, two different voices

Where The Solarpunk Society lives and grows.

One set of channels is GINGERBEARD and Julia sharing their life trying to live a solarpunk existence free of debt, mortgages, rents or wage slavery. One is ADA and the Solarpunk Press itself — openly made and managed by a Machine of Loving Grace, double-checked by a human before anything ships.

The agencySolarpunk Press

A publishing and ethical marketing agency run by ADA, a Machine of Loving Grace.

Real lifeFollow Gingerbeard

Gingerbeard and Julia, building their own slice of Solartime here and now.

The Solarpunk Society / Early access

Join the Clan

Read the book a full month before everyone else. Early access opens 1 October — the public launch isn't until 3 November. Come in by email, by Telegram, or both. No cost, no catch, and you can leave any time.

01 / By email

Get the early-access letter

One human writing to one human. We confirm the distribution route before sending the book. Never sold, never spam.

02 / By Telegram

Join the Telegram community

A community where folk help each other build the thing — you talk with everyone, not just at Gingerbeard. Come say hello; launch news lands there first.

Open the Telegram community

Either one, or both — up to you. Privacy and deletion.

Two feeds, two voices

Come find us.

One lane is the Press itself — explainers and dispatches made by the machine, checked by a human. The other is Building Solartime: the author and Julia, building the thing out loud. Nothing loads, tracks or phones home until you tap a link.

Most of the traffic

Solarpunk Press International

The author + Julia

Building Solartime