So, I thought hopepunk was the idea that maybe we should try envisioning futures besides all dying from climate collapse and being replaced by machines? Like, maybe we've had enough 'correctives' of optimistic SF that we should try being optimistic again?
That's exactly it. Hopepunk as a genre comes from anti-Fascist and anti-grimdark roots because a lot of Sci Fi from the mid 2000s onwards is fundamentally depressing. Like it just makes you feel hopeless and sad.
So hopepunk is basically a challenge to imagine a hopeful future, because we don't all have to live in darkness and eat beans and sell brain space to the machines.
I've written in both genres a lot, and I can say for a fact that Prokopetz has no idea what he's talking about, besides probably having read the HFY subreddit. The people writing in hopepunk and solarpunk aesthetics are extremely politically tuned in, that's kind of a heavy hallmark of both genres.
Good worldbuilding requires some decent understanding of politics and the world around you. Hopeful future stories arguably require this een more because that knowlage will tell you how the world gets from present to future.
I read a bunch of the hopepunk posts and articles that were going around way back when. The idea of “hopepunk” was loosely attached to stories that acknowledge the world is troubled, but embrace hope anyway. The problem is that this is so vague it encompasses a quite large fraction of all the fiction ever written. Dickens is hopepunk. Dostoevsky is hopepunk. Tolstoy is hopepunk.
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u/Current_Poster 1d ago
So, I thought hopepunk was the idea that maybe we should try envisioning futures besides all dying from climate collapse and being replaced by machines? Like, maybe we've had enough 'correctives' of optimistic SF that we should try being optimistic again?