«Greg Lynall’s Imagining Solar Energy is worth every metaphor of sunlight a reader might consider. It is a dazzling achievement: an intellectual highlight of recent literature and science scholarship that illuminates so much of our imaginative relationship to the sun across a stretch of time from the Renaissance to the present moment. Political in its interventions and global in its conceptualisations Imagining Solar Energy is also detailed, exacting, comprehensive. Taking in early seventeenth century pamphlets decrying renewable energy and twenty-first century solarpunk fictions wrestling with climate change Lynall offers a rich collection of entangled scientific, literary and cultural readings of the sun’s dangerous and restorative power. Striking for its erudition across solar sciences as well as literary periods, it will impress, too, for the eloquence of its environmental interventions.»

Martin Willis, Professor of English, Cardiff University, UK

«Imagining Solar Energy brilliantly illuminates our literary and scientific relationship with alternative energy. At a time when many ecocritics are examining the story of fossil fuel’s ascendancy, Lynall is the first to narrate our quest to harness its originating source: solar power. The high standard of research and astounding chronological scope make this volume a break-through in renewable energy scholarship. Casting a wide arc from Prometheus, Archimedes and the wonder of the technological sublime to photovoltaic cells, death-ray skyscrapers, and solarpunk rebellions, Lynall masterfully intertwines literature, science, and cultural history, including its shades of patriarchy and tyranny. Imagining Solar Energy is a key tool for Anthropocene studies which will shape the future of renewable of energy scholarship for years to come.»

Kelly Sultzbach, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, USA