Like the previous story, this is much more of a first chapter than it is a complete short story. In a world where people harvest dragon scales to use like solar panels, someone is hunting and shooting down the dragons. A countess with a kink for motor oil? The witch behind the Red Door is there for you." Are you a duke with a penchant for diesel engines? The Red Door is your place. "The Red Door was synonymous with all things forbidden: sex, drugs, magic, and petroleum. This is such an great idea, and so much more could be done with it. One of the most awesome parts of this story was The Red Door. It feels like a first chapter rather than a fully-realized short story, and if it were given the room to breathe, I'm sure we'd get all that backstory much better fleshed out. Really, it's a symptom of the fact that this should be a novel. The backstory about climate change and renewal is too brief, glossing over how we got to this world, but that's also not the focus of the story. Magic exists in Dubas's world, but it wasn't magic that reversed our ecological damage. Is solarpunk a genre, or is it an aesthetic, the way horror can be considered an aesthetic? Can solarpunk be overlaid onto other genres without losing its core? Maybe it can. This is urban fantasy in a solarpunk setting, and, I don't know, it kind of works. I ranted last time about how I thought solarpunk should remain science fiction and not get too tangled up with fantasy and magic, but this story is making me question that assertion.
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