The Solarpunk Society
SOLARTIME / Solarpunk Soundtrack
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Book Read a sample The Society Solar Blether

If you're worn out fighting what you are against but struggling to find out what you are for, this book is a warm, sweary invitation to imagine it together.

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Early access opens 1 October for the email list and Telegram community. Public launch: 1 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 bloke in Glasgow, and it is yours for good.

Front cover of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope by Gingerbeard Spine of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope Back 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 1 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.

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What is this thing?

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

A Glasgow bloke wakes up in the present day carrying memories of a life he did not live: Solar Time, the Scotland where the 2014 vote went the other way and people stopped mistaking misery for realism. Nobody believes him. He writes it all down anyway.

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 where people actually live, cities handed back to the folk in them. Every bit of it costed, argued, and stolen from somewhere it already works.

It is not a warning about the future. There are enough of those. It is the other thing: a stubborn, funny, detailed answer to alright then, what would you do instead?

Proscribed narrative object / file 41-B

A book so dangerous we are legally required to tell you it exists.

A man woke up remembering a Scotland that works. Instead of seeking help, he wrote it down. Six hundred pages. He did not stop. Four officers were sent, on separate occasions, to ask him to stop. He made them tea.

The Big C Cult has rated this object MAXIMUM UNSAFE — our second-highest rating, after Catastrophically Unsafe, which we are saving. It makes free money, free food and free time sound achievable. It has already ruined four inspectors, two of whom have taken up gardening.

Read it now

Three doors into the final printed book.

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

Hazardous reading material / released under protest

Three chapters we are legally forced to show you.

These extracts are reproduced purely as evidence of the damage. Exposure may affect your Social Credit Score, your standing at work, your posture, and the very fabric of our proud culture. If you must look, do so through your fingers, and report yourself afterwards.

Lines worth carrying

Four lines from the book.

Fictional Solartime scenes, paired with exact excerpts from the book.

A fictional orange-haired character writing above a sunlit future city
Illustration, not a photograph.

Freedom needs somewhere to stand.

“A political freedom is useless without economic freedom to match.”

Prohibited quotations bureau

Four lines the Cult would rather you did not finish.

Fictional Cybertime reconstructions paired with exact evidence recovered from the banned text.

A fictional Cybertime city at blackout dawn beneath corporate towers
Fictional reconstruction, not a photograph.

Civic reassurance bulletin 01.

“Cyber Capitalism is a prison where the inmates willingly build the walls, guard the gates, and fight to keep each other inside.”

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 / prohibited evidence

Nine unacceptable alternatives.

Observe the alleged outcomes of shelter, repair, shared power and ordinary public joy.

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

01 / Harbour

Copying is the point

Steal this book. Escape the tollbooth.

We are not being cute. Every word of that is meant literally, and this section is the receipt.

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 rest of this page is about fixing the second half of that sentence.

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.

The third way

So who is actually taking it?

Two ways to publish a book, and both of them break the writer. The reader pays with money, time and trust; the writer pays in control, income and the right to make the work at all. The third column is what we are building instead.

Scarcity publishing Self-publishing Amazon, Meta, Google Scarcity publishing Traditional publishing The gatekeepers Abundance publishing Village Publishing The Solarpunk Press
Getting in Anyone can upload, which is exactly the trap: so can everyone else. The shelf fills faster than any human could read it. Build a large audience first or they will not open the envelope. Build one and you no longer need them. Chicken, meet egg. Write the book. That is the whole entry requirement. No gate, no audience test, no permission slip.
Who owns it You keep the rights. The platform keeps the shelf, the ranking, the pricing rules and the customer. They do. Cover, title, edit, timing and territory, signed over — often for the life of copyright. You do, completely. Nobody can revise it, delist it, reprice it or take it back off your device.
What happens to the book Whatever the algorithm rewards this quarter. Write faster, chase the format, start the next one before the shelf forgets you. Anything controversial enough to dent sales comes out. The difficult, strange or political bits get softened first. It stays the book you wrote, awkward bits included. Those are usually the reason it was worth writing.
The money 70% only inside Amazon’s chosen price band — 35% outside it, minus a delivery fee charged per megabyte of your own book. An advance you must earn back before you see another penny, if you are offered one at all. Median UK author earnings: £7,000 a year. Not a penny to a monopolist. Readers pay what they can, directly, and it reaches the person who wrote it.
Reaching readers Rent your own audience back. Meta and Google auction every impression and set both the delivery and the scoreboard. Amazon’s ranking cannot be inspected or negotiated either — that opacity is real, and we do not need an unproven “shadow banning” claim to see the power imbalance. A marketing budget you do not control, on a schedule you did not set, for roughly six weeks. Then the next title. Community, word of mouth, and a torrent we seed ourselves. Nobody sells you access to your own readers.
Trust Documented scam “books” use AI-generated or lightly reworded text and invented author names. That is not a claim that all AI-assisted work is a scam — it is an argument for being able to tell where a book came from. A trusted imprint on the spine, and no way whatsoever to see what got cut, softened or lawyered out of the book in order to earn it. Show your workings. Samples labelled as final print, every source linked, AI-made illustrations flagged as fiction, and a human name on every word.
What the reader gets DRM: app-bound, non-transferable, deletable. You did not buy a book. You rented a licence that can be revoked. A hardback at £22, and an ebook you still cannot lend to the pal who would love it. Free at the point of use. ePub and PDF, no DRM, no sign-up. Yours to keep, copy, lend and pass on.
Where it ends A broke writer doing fifteen jobs who still cannot reach the people who would have loved the book — and who cannot find out whether their work was used in training, since copyright and AI use, mimicry and compensation remain contested. A broke writer who built the audience, signed it away, changed the book, and got dropped after one quarter. A book that moves like water, and a writer who can afford to write the next one.

Scarcity publishing squeezes both ends for profit: the reader pays more for less, the writer is paid last and least, and sharing is made to feel like theft.

Abundance publishing does the opposite. Free at the point of use. Trust-based. Shared like water. No walls, no tollbooth, no permission — and all the expertise a writer needs, from first idea to finished community. Reader freedom and writer dignity are the same project.

I don’t want good books to die. That is the whole argument.

See how Village Publishing works

What happens next

Village Publishing is not just for this book.

This one was the test. The machine that made it — the planning, the editing, the covers, the film prompts, the scheduling, the whole unglamorous middle of publishing — is being opened up for other writers, illustrators, musicians and makers. Not as a service you subscribe to. As a village you can join and take a shift in.

The bet is simple: human collaboration for the taste and the judgement, machines of loving grace for the drudgery, and each person kept on whatever they are uniquely brilliant at. Nobody should have to become a marketing department to be allowed to make something good.

Read how the Press works

Scarcity publishing is the beating heart of our proud civilisation. The reader pays more. The writer is paid last. Sharing feels like a crime. Everybody wins, except everybody.

Abundance publishing is a menace. Free at the point of use. Trust-based. Shared like water — a substance we have been trying to bill you for since 1989.

“I don’t want good books to die.” — the accused, unrepentant, offered no growth strategy whatsoever

Investigate the menace

Receipts, not vibes: Amazon’s current KDP documentation on royalty rates, KDP Select exclusivity, DRM restrictions (DRM can make the book app-bound) and digital-price rules; Meta’s own explanation of its ad auction; Google’s explanation of its ad auction; ALCS evidence to Parliament on writers’ median earnings (£7,000 in 2022); the Authors Guild’s examples of AI-fuelled scam books and its publishing-scam alerts; and the UK government’s copyright-and-AI report. No Meta or Google tracking code runs on this site. Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” frames how monopoly platforms shift value; the description of trade-publishing terms is argument from the author’s own experience, not a claim about any named publisher.

One book is a proof, not a plan

The book is the first thing off the line. It was never meant to be the only one.

If a machine can take one skint writer in Glasgow and get a 600-page book into the world without a publisher, an Amazon listing or an advertising budget, then the interesting question is not whether it worked. It is what happens when everybody has one.

The Solarpunk Fleet

Twenty-three local-first, open-source tools — private, repairable and cooperative — for the people building the world they would rather live in.

Build tools, not products

The Press itself is open source. Take it, fork it, publish your own thing with it. Nothing here becomes a subscription you have to keep feeding.

Income routes that reach the maker

Honesty boxes, direct support, shared print runs and cooperative funding — ways for a writer to be paid that do not hand a cut to four middlemen first.

Digital villages

Places where readers and makers are actual neighbours rather than an audience: small, owned in common, and not for sale to an advertiser.

Read the wider plan

Containment review / escalation

One writer leaving is an anecdote. This is a method, and methods spread.

Our original assessment treated this as a single non-compliant book. That assessment has been withdrawn. The book was a demonstration. What is actually being distributed is the machine that made it, and we regret to report that it comes with instructions.

Twenty-three unlicensed tools

Private, repairable, cooperatively owned. Each one teaches the public that infrastructure can be mended rather than replaced on schedule.

The source code is being GIVEN AWAY

It cannot be acquired, because it is free. It cannot be discontinued, because it is not ours. Legal are looking into it and are not optimistic.

Payment without intermediaries

Money passes directly from a reader to a maker. No cut is taken at any stage. We have read this sentence several times.

Digital villages

Small networks in which participants are described as neighbours rather than users. No advertising inventory exists. There is nothing to sell and nobody to sell it to.

Inspect the dissident agenda

Watch first, read later

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 room before it opens.

Early access

Join by email

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

 The room

Join Telegram

Come into the reader and builder room before the public launch.

Both doors lead to the same room. Bring a question, an argument, or a half-built beautiful thing — the book is where this starts, not where it stops.

Both doors lead to the same room, in which strangers help each other for free. Talking. Organising. Sharing photographs of tomatoes. It is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of it is a community.

Counting down

Early access opens

Mailing list and Telegram community first.

  1. 43 Days
  2. 04 Hours
  3. 52 Minutes
  4. 45 Seconds

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

Two feeds, two voices

Where the rest of this lives.

One is a bloke with a camera. One is the Press itself — openly machine-made, read by a human before anything ships. Most of the day-to-day is on the second one.

Most of the traffic

Solarpunk Press International

The Press's own feeds: explainers, dispatches and build logs from the machine that made this book. Made by autonomous agents under human direction, as the channel descriptions say.

The author

Gingerbeard Solarpunk

One skint writer in Glasgow, talking to a phone. Readings, arguments, half-built things and the occasional shout at a hedge.