What Is Hopepunk?

For me, the most interesting panel at Finncon was the one on Hopepunk. It is not a genre that I have paid much attention to in the past. I had a vague idea that to qualify as Hopepunk a book had to be unchallenging, heartwarming and relentlessly positive, after the manner of a Travis Baldree novel. This panel disabused me of that notion, and also got me thinking that Wizard’s Tower might have published some Hopepunk.

Please note that this essay will contain some spoilers for Welcome to Boy.net and Generation Nemesis.

The term, Hopepunk, was first coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017 as a counter to Grimdark, and the official definition, at least according to Wikipedia, is that Hopepunk books are about, “characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”. There’s nothing necessarily soft and fluffy about that. What I learned from the panel, and the Wikipedia entry, is that Hopepunk practitioners have embraced the necessity to fight for a positive future.

What I took away from this is the idea that to qualify as Hopepunk, a book (or other work) has to show belief that a better world is possible, and can be achieved by people acting in a positive, progressive and cooperative way. This does relate well to the original concept, because the primary ethos of Grimdark is that, no matter what anyone does, things will always turn out badly.

So how does this relate to Wizard’s Tower? Firstly I would like to point readers at Lyda Morehouse’s Welcome to Boy.net. On the face of it, this is hardly a cuddly book. It features a pair of lesbian bounty hunters fighting against an oppressive military dictatorship that wants to take over the Solar System. One of our heroines is a former senior officer in that society who defected so that she could undergo gender transition. It all seems rather grim.

But, and this is the thing I loved most about the book when I first read it, while Lucia del Toro does occasionally have to make use of her cyborg abilities, this is not how our heroines win the day. Victory is achieved, not through force of arms, but through the citizens of the free colonies of the Asteroid Belt refusing to be cowed by thugs in uniforms. There is political protest. People get out on the street with banners. That is not the usual ending for a piece of space opera. And it very much suggests that a better world is possible if we all work together for it.

The other book that I want to discuss is Sean McMullen’s Generation Nemesis. That’s a book that has been getting very negative responses when I’ve talk to people about it at conventions. It is, after all, set in a world in which Earth’s climate has been comprehensively wrecked, and vast numbers of people have died. It seems that a lot of people don’t want to admit that climate collapse is now likely, and prefer to read books in which it is not an issue, or where it is somehow prevented. Sean takes what I think is a more realistic view. We are probably already past the point of no return. The question now is how we deal with it.

The plot of Generation Nemesis suggests that humanity will react with anger, and that young people who have seen themselves denied the sort of future that their ancestors enjoyed, will turn upon the old. Drawing on the Terror of the French Revolution, Sean creates a world in which the only choices facing the elderly are a matter of how soon, and how horribly, they are executed.

And yet the book is not without hope. The plot revolves around the attempts of the scientist hero, Jason Hall, to convince the climate courts that revenge is a wasteful strategy. While a few elderly people are indeed wasters in every sense of the word, most of them have some useful skills and can be useful to a society that desperately needs all the help it can get to adapt to the radically different world it has inherited. If the book has a message, it is that humanity can survive climate collapse, but only if we all work together rather than turning on each other. That sounds like Hopepunk to me.

Of course your mileage may differ. And I’m not advertising either book as Hopepunk. That’s partly because I find such labels limiting, and partly because I don’t want to get into any fannish fights about whether the books deserve the label. However, hopefully this essay will help you see both books in a different light. I know that the Finncon panel did that for me. My thanks to Xan van Rooyen for organizing it.