For those of you who don't know, BRAVE NEW GIRLS is a young adult sci-fi anthology series about girls in STEM, edited by Paige Daniels and myself. Proceeds from sales benefit the Society of Women Engineers. This year's anthology, TALES OF GIRLS WHO ENGINEER AND EXPLORE, will be our seventh (!!).
This year, my own contribution is a solarpunk adventure called "The Lost Lab," about two teens searching for a rare plant. I'll admit it took a while for me to get going with this one. Co-editor Paige Daniels and I decided late last year that we wanted a solarpunk cover for this year's anthology, mostly because we hadn't done one before and thought it would be fun. And while all the BRAVE NEW GIRLS short story collections span multiple sci-fi subgenres, we wanted to make sure at least some matched the cover vibes, so we both opted to write solarpunk tales. I, for one, had never written solarpunk before, so of course I had to give it a try.
What is solarpunk anyway? It's a subgenre of sci-fi that imagines a world where technology and nature live in harmony. As such, it tends to lean utopian. Think high-tech cities powered by clean energy and covered in roof and wall gardens.
The first concept I had for my short story was that it would be about a girl living in a solarpunk future who has a mechanical arm, and whose family is going broke paying it off (hey, just because society has stopped destroying the ozone doesn't mean medical debt disappeared). So she needs a get-rich-quick scheme, and my first idea was that she'd need to win a science fair of some sort.
But thanks to my procrastinating, I didn't end up writing my own story for this anthology until after we'd accepted submissions, and quite a few of the stories we selected were about science fairs / competitions. Okay, I thought, scratch that. How about a heist? Except we'd also accepted some of those too.
That's when it hit me: treasure hunt! Something Indiana Jones-y, except futuristic, and without the colonial overtones.
So in "The Lost Lab," the girl, Amara, and her partner-in-crime, Ravi, discover the long-lost lab of an eccentric scientist who died two hundred years earlier, and who was rumored to have bioengineered a superfood. Of course, said scientist booby-trapped her lab to prevent anyone from stealing her work. And it turns out they aren't the only ones after it...
Though it took a while for the idea to come together (I confess, I used ChatGPT for brainstorming, though it seemed weirdly fixated on Amara's arm...), once it did, the actual writing process went smoothly (No, I didn't let ChatGPT produce any actual sentences for the story. Mostly because they would have sucked, and I would've had to rewrite them all anyway.)
Here's the illustration, drawn by the amazing Adriano Moraes:
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