Book launch / Solar Time dispatch 001

The Solarpunk Society

A Glaswegian field report from the timeline where Scotland swerved the worst of Cyber Time and built something stranger, kinder, and harder to sell back to us.

Final manuscript, buy links, and torrent hash are placeholders until the book file is locked.

Proudly not sold on Amazon Draft cover art for The Solarpunk Society
Working cover placeholder / final jacket to be chosen

What is this thing?

A timeline-hopping manifesto disguised as a very sweary pub story.

Gingerbeard wakes up in our actual present with memories from Solar Time: an alternative Scotland where the 2014 Yes vote cracked history open and people stopped mistaking misery for realism.

The book moves between comic testimony, political imagination, and practical provocation: citizen dividends, sortition, consensus halls, food sovereignty, local-first tools, rewilded cities, and the stubborn belief that the world is not done yet.

An imagined Glasgow pub table covered in a marked-up book manuscript, tea, flyers and a small solar repair kit.
Imagined book-world scene

A book with mud on its boots

Not a tidy manifesto. A map made at the table after closing time.

A political freedom is useless without economic freedom to match.

That is the engine beneath the jokes, the time travel and the swearing: a better world has to be practical enough to repair, share and argue about.

Choose your timeline

Same city. Different story.

One path turns Glasgow into a subscription service with bad lighting. The other gives people the means to look after each other.

Cyber Time: the same imagined Glasgow street under extractive platform capitalism Solar Time: the same imagined Glasgow street remade for people and public life

Sample chapters

Three doors into the book. Final text pending.

Open all sample chapters

A dispatch from the author

Corporations will not save your home.

This is the first real moving voice on the site: an approved short from the launch archive. More author films, readings, and captions will build out this room as the final campaign takes shape.

An illustrated Solar Time character study of Gingerbeard in a rain-bright Glasgow lane, wearing a worn green jumper and denim jacket.
Illustrated Solar Time character study
Meet the book properly
Approved launch archive / replaceable with the final author film

The signal room

Three wee doors into Solar Time.

Not a feed. Three proper dispatches: one about looking after each other, one about taking democracy back, and one about bees refusing admin.

01 / Mutual aid / Arran dispatch

Trust your neighbour before the insurance policy.

A storm, a roof, a blocked road: the first infrastructure that matters is people who know how to show up.

Follow the mutual-aid thread
02 / Democratic repair / Glasgow dispatch

Democracy needs more than a ballot every few years.

A short, sharp doorway into sortition, shared power and the book’s argument against a permanent political class.

Open the sortition idea
03 / Wild joy / Bee dispatch

Do bees pay their taxes?

A daft little question with a serious undercurrent: the living world does not need permission to be generous.

Step sideways into the Wyrd One

Watch the dispatch

Choose a signal.

Select one of the three dispatches to watch it here.

Inside the book

A simple idea map for a complicated better world.

The book’s proposals do not sit alone. Follow power, housing, public investment, democratic repair, and the culture of making things together.

Explore the idea map
A community book stall in front of a bold Solarpunk public mural

Proudly not sold on Amazon

The largest tollbooth in the room does not get to own the exit.

This isn’t about sales. It’s about signals. Direct sales, pay-what-you-can access, print partners, community sharing, and torrents keep the work closer to the people it was written for. Bezos can find another castle to haunt.