Thirteen families, one clock

The first full-immersion wasteland festival is held in the Mojave Desert, and Apocalypse World reinvents tabletop play. Fans start building the aesthetic for real.

Craig Venter's team boots a bacterium on a chemically synthesized genome, JCVI-syn1.0.

Solarpunk crystallizes as an optimistic, sun-powered ecological aesthetic. Its daylight enthusiasm makes room, by contrast, for a question: what about the night?

FromSoftware's Dark Souls builds an entire cosmology around dying embers and rekindled bonfires, an Age of Fire fading into ash, and the terrible choice of whether to relight it.

The Steampunk Bible is published, and Steampunk HQ opens in Oamaru, New Zealand.

James Cameron pilots Deepsea Challenger alone to the bottom of the Challenger Deep on 26 March, the first solo dive there. The director of The Abyss goes down for real.

In Brazil, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro edits the Portuguese-language anthology later translated as Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, the first explicitly solarpunk book.

Naughty Dog's fungal-pandemic game makes the genre intimate. A decade later it becomes a hit HBO series.

In AMP v. Myriad Genetics, the US Supreme Court rules that naturally occurring DNA cannot be patented just by isolating it. The same year, Orphan Black puts a patented clone on television.

Bong Joon Ho adapts Le Transperceneige into a global hit. Class war on a frozen planet reaches multiplexes.

BioShock Infinite drops Columbia from the sky. Steampunk video games are suddenly a genre of their own.

Emily St. John Mandel sends a Shakespeare troupe across a post-pandemic world. The genre's hope finds its manifesto.

CRISPR/Cas9 makes gene editing cheap and routine. Real labs catch up with biopunk fiction. The fiction has to keep running.

Parks Canada locates the wreck of HMS Erebus; Terror follows in 2016. The Franklin mystery surfaces from the ice.

Solarpunk concept art spreads on Tumblr, and Adam Flynn's “Solarpunk: Notes Toward a Manifesto” on Project Hieroglyph turns an aesthetic into a literary movement.

George Miller returns with Mad Max: Fury Road: the wasteland as opera, Furiosa's rebellion as apocapunk distilled to pure, screaming motion.

The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, edited by Sean Wallace, gathers the genre's short fiction into one volume.

Failbetter Games release Sunless Sea: a Victorian London that has sunk and stayed sunk, traversed by steam-powered cutters and a crew with too many secrets. The same year Frictional's SOMA sets its horror in a station on the Atlantic floor.

Max Richter releases Sleep, an eight-and-a-half-hour album designed to be slept through. Rest becomes an artwork.

George Miller's Wasteland perfects pyropunk cinema: war rigs, flame-throwing guitars, and a sun-blasted hellscape where fire is spectacle, religion, and the only law left.

Jakub Różalski's paintings become the board game Scythe; the video game Iron Harvest follows in 2020. Mechs in the wheat fields go mainstream.

A new world atlas of artificial sky brightness finds that more than 80% of humanity lives under light-polluted skies.

Atsushi Ohkubo's Fire Force (2015) and Tatsuki Fujimoto's Fire Punch (2016) make spontaneous combustion and endless burning the subject of two of the decade's most distinctive manga.

Nisi Shawl's Everfair imagines steam technology in African hands, resisting Leopold II in the Congo.

Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 revisits the world that set the visual template 35 years earlier.

Hinterland releases its survival game of a Canadian winter after a geomagnetic disaster. Survival sim and frostpunk mood meet.

Ninja Theory renders psychosis from the inside. Perception hacking stops being a metaphor and becomes a controller in your hands.

Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation collects fiction, poetry and art, followed in 2018 by Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers and the English translation of the Brazilian anthology.

Alex Garland adapts Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation. The biopunk uncanny goes mainstream, iridescent, refractive, beautiful, wrong.

He Jiankui announces the first gene-edited babies, twin girls born in October. The scientific world reacts with alarm.

Low-Tech Magazine relaunches as a solar-powered website hosted on a small server in Barcelona, sometimes offline when the sky is grey.

Makoto Shinkai's Weathering with You drowns Tokyo at the box office while Rivers Solomon's The Deep turns the Drexciya myth into a novella.

The Solarpunk Druid blog asks "What is Lunarpunk?" in July, sketching bioluminescent towns, darker palettes and eco-spirituality.

Studio Trigger's Promare and David Production's Fire Force anime arrive the same year, turning pyrokinetic mutants and firefighting brigades into neon spectacle.

A Solarpunk Manifesto distils years of community writing into a widely shared text, and ASU publishes The Weight of Light, a free anthology of solar futures.