Call for Book Chapters: Reimagining Futures in Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk Narratives
Call for Book Chapters
Reimagining Futures in Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk Narratives
As speculative genres and cultural aesthetics, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk explore alternative visions of technology, society, and the future. Each of these “punk” imaginaries negotiates the dynamic interplay between progress and resistance, industrialism and ecology, dystopia and utopia. While Steampunk reimagines the industrial past through retrofuturistic aesthetics, Cyberpunk envisions digital dystopias dominated by artificial intelligence, virtual realities, and corporate control. Solarpunk, by contrast, offers an eco-utopian vision that embraces sustainability, collaboration, and technological harmony with the environment. Together, they form a continuum of speculative storytelling that interrogates human identity, ethics, and the imagination of possible futures.
With this call for papers, we invite scholars working in literary, cultural, media, and film studies—as well as in linguistics, semiotics, and visual studies—to contribute to this edited volume. We particularly welcome comparative or cross-genre perspectives that explore the interconnections among Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk, as well as their social, ecological, and technological implications. We encourage submissions in German and English that engage but not limited with the following topics:
- Representations of technology, ecology, and temporality in Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk
- Narratives of resistance, hope, and renewal across the “punk” spectrum
- Artificial Intelligence and human-machine relations in speculative fiction
- Eco-utopian and posthuman visions in Solarpunk narratives
- The evolution from Cyberpunk dystopia to Solarpunk utopia
- Hybrid aesthetics: mechanical, digital, and organic motifs
- Gender, body, and identity in Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk
- Transmedia storytelling: from literature to film, video games, and graphic novels
- Post-Cyberpunk and Neo-Solarpunk as emerging narrative paradigms
Publication: Selected papers will be published by Maurer Press in the book series entitled Interdisciplinary Studies on Philology (Frankfurt am Main, Germany).
Book Title: Reimagining Futures in Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and Solarpunk Narratives
Publisher: Maurer Press (Germany)
CPC: The CPC for publication in this volume is 130 Euro per chapter.
Submitting your paper: Please send your paper proposals (max. 1 DIN-A-Size, Times New Roman 12, 250-300 words) and a 100-word author biography till February 1, 2026 to the editors of the volume listed below:
Assoc. Prof. Irem Atasoy, Istanbul University, Department of German Language and Literature
Assoc. Prof. Habib Tekin, Marmara University, Department of German Language and Literature