Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri, solarpunk writer and editor, depicts an ecotopian community thriving through the climate crisis after the collapse of the current global economy. In dialogue with current trends in politics and environmentalism—as well as timeless themes like the weight of history over individuals, the conflict for power between different generations, and the tension between the ideal and reality—Ulibarri explores morality and accountability in a world haunted by past actions and their environmental consequences. Can we really start over from scratch in a world so shaped by the past? Can decades of service and commitment to the greater good be condemned by a previous life?
The story follows Galacia, cofounder of Otra Vida and its current conflict mediator. The novel begins with a stunning conceptual breakthrough: Galacia’s nephew just figured out how to identify one’s past life via gene analysis. And of course everyone wants to know who they were.
Everyone but Galacia.
But here’s the deal: she’s running against Tanner to be reelected as mediator, her odds don’t look good, and she feels her opponent is too young, too inexperienced to lead the town she’s devoted her life to… And Otravidans demand both candidates reveal who they were in their past life before their public debate. Galacia has nowhere to hide when Diego, maverick scientist and her nephew, tells her she used to be “universally hated” Thomas Ramsey, “the man who had declared climate change wasn’t worth fixing because he had ships ready to take everyone who could afford a ticket to Planet B” (p. 4).
Her move? Hiding her past life from her constituents, as long as she can. Dealing with such a shocking revelation has been added to the list of the conflicts she has to mediate, only this one is about herself. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate already, Galacia also has to deal with an external threat: outside forces are trying to sabotage Otra Vida.
Another Life tackles morality, responsibility and heritage in a way only speculative fiction can. What began as a fun curiosity (having your past life figured out by science) soon turns people’s moral judgment about Galacia around. Despite the fact that she’s dedicated her whole life to Otra Vida, people suddenly hold her accountable for Ramsey’s dues, even if this character’s motives aren’t precisely those reported by historical records. Is a life of service to others and the environment enough to wash from one’s skin the faults of previous generations? Or the other way around: Can we really hold people accountable for past deeds they didn’t actually commit?
The questions raised by Ulibarri’s science fictional element (the novum) are some of the same questions asked in contemporary discussions of identity politics, privilege acknowledgement, and history revisionism. While Ulibarri resists the kind of oversimplifying that could reduce Galacia’s story to a moralistic fable, the narrative does seem to come down on one side of the debate. “I think there’s a reason we forget. We can’t get so hung up on who we used to be that we forget to be who we are” (p. 150), says one of the characters, stressing the overarching theme of Another Life: How do we deal with the past so we can move forward?
The other novum in the novel is the seed of its environmental dimension: the creation of an artificial lake in Death Valley, California, by pumping desalinated sea water into the desert through an unused oil pipeline. From the Oil to Water Project stems a social movement that will crystallize in Otra Vida, an autonomous town of about 2,000 people that by the time the novel unfolds has effectively abolished wage labor and poverty for its people by harnessing technology in sustainable ways. It has, in time and without intention, developed social classes and centralized the power in the figure of the Mediator—a power Galacia leverages in favor of the Founders (of Otra Vida) and the Inheritors (their offsprings) in detriment of the Petitioners (outsiders immigrated and accepted into the ecotopia after its foundation).
Otra Vida is not a perfect utopia after all, and Galacia is like Ramsey in a certain way. Even when they weren’t supposed to centralize power over a figure such as a president, Otravidans ended up doing so out of habit and comfort. Is it Galacia’s fault she handles power the way she does, or is it the people who endowed her with it in the first place? As a reader from outside the USA who has witnessed radically different ways of decentralized political organization, I initially thought this was a flaw in the novel. But what I thought was a lack of imagination turned into one of the central themes: even utopias have to reckon with former power and government practices and their present influence. Ulibarri thus challenges utopianism and points towards one of its big issues: it is always made by people with a political past and history.
Part of the reason I became interested in Another Life is that the novella is labeled as solarpunk. Indeed, Ulibarri has edited Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters (2020), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021), as well as authored several short stories in the same subgenre. Having both followed the development of solarpunk and read her work before, I couldn’t miss Another Life, especially since it’s one of the first solarpunk works that surpasses the length of the short story. And it has to be said: as a solarpunk novella, Another Life delivers. Reading about Otra Vida as an ecological utopia and how it functions despite the climate crisis is hopeful and reassuring. If you want to read about a community overcoming the climate crisis by building a sustainable, technologically advanced community, this novella is definitely a must.
Stylistically, Another Life employs straightforward, clear language that works well for depicting a radically different world. We can see that in the following excerpt from chapter two:
We wove through the sculpture park, where I noticed a couple of recent additions: a delightful stained glass windspinner, and a rusted gas-era pickup truck with a hundred baby dolls glued to it. Zacharia showed little interest in the collection of quirky art projects, so we didn’t linger. (p. 20)
While at first sight the particularization of the art pieces might seem excessive, it doesn’t get clunky and gives us the right amount of information so we can imagine them. This strategy of clear, particularized description and narration is used extensively. Even though I sometimes found it weird that Galacia spoke that way throughout the novel, it didn’t matter much because it’s a device which serves the purpose of depicting a utopian community to the reader in an accessible way.
And there are figures of speech after all, as seen in the following quote: “Anger started as a heat in my chest, spreading like a bushfire through my entire body. My fists curled so tightly my fingernails left red crescents in my palms” (p. 103). Beyond that, however, there aren’t many passages where Galacia’s speech takes a poetic bend. I get it: maybe it’s just not her thing, she’s not ‘poetsy’ and so doesn’t speak that way. In any case, I found the prose too literal and I don’t think the narrator’s choice justifies the reduction of such an important aspect of storytelling. There are other ways of achieving literary prose while having a protagonist narrator, such as developing her tone or her dialect. And I missed that in Another Life.
Another thing I would’ve liked to find in the story is the consequences of Diego’s discovery. Yes, finding out who they were in their past life takes over Otra Vida and has both personal consequences for Galacia and political ones by influencing the elections, and there are a couple scenes where characters speculate about the discovery’s future consequences, but I found the reaction to it quite mild. I felt the scientific breakthrough was irrelevant for the characters all along. After working as the inciting incident for Galacia’s character arc at the opening chapter, the discovery’s impact over Otra Vida’s society receives little attention. Aside from a couple of dialogue lines where characters debate its philosophical and legal implications, they treat the past life test as a curiosity to gossip about, as they do in the opening scene of the novel:
“You were an old white man?”
Cindy threw her head back and laughed. “I know, isn’t it hilarious?”
“Here, look at mine,” Alex said. Green lights flickered across the balcony as people showed off who they had been. Voices drifted from other buildings, nearly every balcony and patio in the small desert city of Otra Vida alive with discussion and laughter. (p. 3)
Not to say I don’t think people would have fun with their tests and gossip about them. The problem is it doesn’t get to be something else; we don’t really see the social consequences of a scientific breakthrough so radical in its spiritual consequences it’d surely spark a paradigm shift similar to those of the Copernican Revolution or the discussions around the Anthropocene.
Maybe that future society has seen too much, knows too much about the cosmos, so it takes scientifically proven reincarnation as a mere curiosity they could chit chat about over dinner with their pals, as if it were the result of a quirky personality test. But if that’s the case, if such a scientific breakthrough is not astounding for Otravidans because they’ve seen it all, it isn’t shown in the novella and so I kept finding their reaction unfounded and incredible. But then again, maybe it’s just me: I’d go crazy if such a thing as scientifically proving who anyone was in their past life was possible!
When I was reading Another Life, I thought: “I’d definitely be on Galacia’s side: I wouldn’t want to know.” Then I realized that’s the metaphor: past mistakes must be unearthed. Someone has to take responsibility for them, even if they’re not guilty. We forget that in order to be able to look back into the past, to take responsibility for what we see there and transform it, we need to be unchained from its biases. I guess it’s a thin line, the one between either acknowledging the past to move towards a better present, or pretending it never happened at all. Another Life tells a story about coming to terms with the past in order to build a better world, one where past deeds no longer haunt the present. Or, like philosophers Natalia Carrillo and Pau Luque put it:
Feeling guilty in a literal sense when one hasn’t taken part in an action can be an expression of narcissism and, at its extreme, can destroy the inner world and the external world. Feeling guilty in a metaphorical sense, on the other hand, can be an excuse to live an examined life in an Aristotelian sense and thus assume responsibility.[1] (p. 103)
Galacia nearly fell for literal guilt. By telling her story, Ulibarri creates a metaphor that brings the reader close to metaphorical guilt, the kind which reveals to us that injustice doesn’t always follow a straight cause-effect line, but that doesn’t mean no one’s responsible for it.
Another Life has a couple of soft spots, but plenty of well-rounded ones. So many it makes for a fine piece of narrative art. And like any of those, it’ll shake you if you allow yourself to read it. I highly recommend you do.
1. Natalia Carrillo & Pau Luque. Hipocondria moral. Editorial Anagrama. This quote is originally in Spanish; since the text is not available in English, the translation is my own.
