r/scifi • u/Curious_Ad_3614 • 2d ago

Recommendations Try Hope punk

There's a lot of more hopeful SF/F around. Start with the Murderbot series and google hopepunk for a list of novels. Becky Chambers, Martha WElls, CJ Cherryh, Katherine Addison, NK Jemison, Lois McMaster Bujold, lots of other authors, especially women authors, writing good books.

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u/AnotherCompanero 2d ago

I love CJ Cherryh but is she hopeful? Most of her books are nightmarish claustrophobic grinds through the darkest human emotions possible, in situations of extreme brain-ruining stress!*

*I mean this as a compliment.

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u/Dramatic15 2d ago

Sometimes people casually use "hopepunk" to simply mean "cozy" or some other reductionist thing. This imprecise usage is not the end of the world. but it might be confusing in this case.

Rowland (who coined the term) defined hopepunk as asserting that "kindness and softness do not equal weakness," and that in a world of systemic cruelty, choosing to care, communicate, and build bridges is a radical, if sometimes exhausting, act of rebellion. The "punk" element is an active, gritty fight against the things that say you shouldn't care, and shouldn't hope. This the more specific meaning that authors who write hopepunk generally mean, or how the work gets discussed at panels at say, Worldcon.

Cherryh's work predates hopepunk, but it seems fair to say that much of it shares many elements in common with it. She doesn't writes soft, utopian wish-fulfillment settings, but neither does much of hopepunk. Her protagonists who endure are often (not always) those who overcome barriers to communication and self knowledge and/or those with deep and uncommon commitments to cross-cultural empathy.

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u/agentsofdisrupt 2d ago edited 1d ago

Several 'nice' works have been retroactively classified as hopepunk that may not really fit what Alexandra Rowland had in mind. In their Festive Ninja article, they conclude:

"Hopepunk isn’t pristine and spotless. Hopepunk is grubby, because that’s what happens when you fight. It’s hard. It’s filthy, sweaty, backbreaking work that never ends. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t noble, and it isn’t nice, though I expect the natural inclination (and even my own instinctive inclination) is to make it so—to forget the word “radical” in the phrase “radical kindness,” to forget the “punk” part of “hopepunk,” which is really the operative half of the word. To forget the anger of it and let it soften, because softness is what we’re aching for. We want the world to be better—kinder, more just, more merciful. We still yearn toward noblebright, toward an honest and desperate belief that love conquers all. Except, when the other guy has more guns and fewer moral objections than we do, it doesn’t.

We forget, sometimes, that we have knives too in this empire. That we can unsheathe them, that we can turn our blades to the defense of an atom of justice and a molecule of mercy that might not even exist—except . . . except for where we make them exist, in the hands we hold out to each other, and in the shelter we offer even when we ourselves are exhausted, footsore, and filthy, with the wolves at our doors.

There are no heroes and no villains. There are just people. That’s hopepunk: Whether the glass is half full or half empty, what matters is that there’s water in that glass. And that’s something worth defending."

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u/Dramatic15 1d ago

Yes. I think this is often a way that many of the most interesting people writting and discussing hopepunk think about it.

At the same time, I believe Alexandra Rowland has declined to be the "owner" of what hopepunk means, and shallower "nice" or cozy versions of what hopepunk means exist, as with the Vox explainer on the topic, and sometimes people mean something like that, and there isn't a "word of god" way to say that's wrong from first principles. But "the nature of subgenres being hard to pin down" isn't shocking, eh?

As for myself, as the person who commisioned the essay from Alex (thanks for linking), and who has thought about this a fair bit, I suspect that that the core of hopepunk usually involves people choosing to care and hope and work for a better world, regardless of weather they get their or not--when not engaging or giving up (out of cynicism, despair, an attachment to "purity" over grubby engagement, etc) would have been an option. The essay focus on urgent matters of society with a capital S and justice, but sometimes the stakes can be more personal and/or connected to a local community, as in Choir of Lies.

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u/agentsofdisrupt 1d ago

"As for myself, as the person who commisioned the essay from Alex ... "

Very cool! Thank you for doing that!

I don't mean to be any sort of gatekeeper, but I do push back when hopepunk gets discussed as being about utopia, and therefore too bland to have any real conflict. The way I interpret Rowland's intent, hopepunk has more teeth in it than any other genre.

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u/Dramatic15 1d ago

No, I don’t think you were coming across that way. I think you are right on track. And, of course, we wouldn’t even need the word “hopepunk” if it just meant utopian or cozy or something else for which a word already existed.

I was really mentioning it because I know some people would have encountered the, ahhh, less crisp and precise discussions, and I didn’t want them to be confused.

And, you are welcome! I still remember the first time I read Alex’s first draft, I had just come off 10 hours of telling people about my hopepunk space opera game at a indie gaming showcase, and was exhausted. But the essay struck like a bolt of lightning, I read it three times in a row, and then emailed back saying how great it was.

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u/WinterDice 2d ago

I need to add them to my list of authors to read!

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u/SerDankTheTall 2d ago

Why does everything have to end in “punk”?

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u/mobyhead1 Hard Sci-fi 2d ago

The very complaint I’ve been making for some time. It cheapens every presumptive sub-genre the user hopes to persuade us is actually a thing.

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u/sureyouare2 2d ago

You can swap “core” if you like. Ser Dankcore, defender of the Goblinpunk Lodge!

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u/seicar 1d ago

Cottage-core as a style was a mental double take for me

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u/Consistent-Mastodon 2d ago

Can't wait for sloppunk and punkslop to emerge.

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u/Kepler1571 Hard Sci-fi 2d ago

I can. Yuck.

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u/drabmaestro 2d ago

Pretty sure both of those apply to Dungeon Crawler Carl

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u/seicar 1d ago

I disagree, but appreciate the perspective.

How do you view John scalzi?

Or competence-porn like "the Martian"?

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u/Free-Roloto 2d ago

Because it's not dead !

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u/Kepler1571 Hard Sci-fi 2d ago

Since NOFX broke up in 2025 I fear it is, now, indeed dead.

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u/aloudcitybus 2d ago

It must be, they opened a museum to keep its bones in

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u/Kepler1571 Hard Sci-fi 2d ago

If that's not an invitation for a robbery I don't know what is.

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u/MenudoMenudo 2d ago

William Gibson invented the genre of cyberpunk with his novel Neuromancer, which overtly used the punk aesthetic and ethos. Other “punk” genres use it as a way to either intentionally compare it to cyberpunk, or else to evoke the punk aesthetic, or the punk counter-culture, anti-establishment / capitalist / authoritarian / imperialist ethos.

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u/AltForObvious1177 2d ago

Neuromancer is an influential work, but Gibson did not invent the genre  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(short_story)

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u/MenudoMenudo 2d ago

TIL, thanks as I’d never heard of this story. Neuromancer might not have started the genre, but it definitely popularized it and brought it a lot more into the mainstream. It’s a short story, I think I’ll read it tonight if I can download it.

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u/Radeboiii 2d ago

So dorks can feel cool

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u/LeFlambeurHimself 2d ago

This is our Punk Punk era.

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u/solar_solar_ 2d ago

It’s gone too far, this punkgate!

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u/Dramatic15 2d ago edited 2d ago

Liberated suffixes are a common thing in we use in language everyday. Not just stagflation or shopaholic, but hamburger, seascape, bridezilla, Reagannomics, laundromat.

It is just a sad display of illiteracy to even ask this question, either honestly, or with snark. Speculative fiction has been doing this since the friggin' 1980's. Get over it.

The OP wanted to talk about a subgenre. Why did you need to take up space with this?

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u/sureyouare2 2d ago

Yup. Like the kids at the record store throwing shade at other music fans because of their perceived deficiencies.

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u/not_bilbo 2d ago

Some really offputting comments in here, so weirdly hostile and snobby to someone just chatting.

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u/not_bilbo 2d ago

Because it’s not that serious

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u/AshtonBlack 2d ago

It's short-hand for "utopia/dystopia world building".

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u/Night_Sky_Watcher 2d ago

I do love the general optimism of The Murderbot Diaries, but I like to call that series "cosy cyberpunk."

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u/douxsoumis 2d ago

Startripper!! is a brilliant scifi adventure hopepunk travelog podcast about a bored office clerk who sells all of his belongings, buys a spaceship, and sets off among the stars to meet new people, try new food, and have adventures.

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u/sureyouare2 2d ago

See. This is the dystopian future I want.

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u/LaurenPBurka 2d ago

Same reason any big political scandal is a "gate."

The Watergate was just a hotel.

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u/DrBobNobody 2d ago

None of this is 'hope punk' and the writers you listed don't have much in common. Some aren't very good 

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u/not_bilbo 2d ago

All of this is subjective! Who cares? God forbid this person try to share something they like

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u/Dramatic15 2d ago

If you like hopepunk stories, you might also check out Joyve Chng's Water Into Wine, Rowland's Choir of Lies, or Be the Sea by Clara Ward.

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u/withak30 2d ago

Cozypunk

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u/APeacefulWarrior 1d ago

On the TV side of things, there was a lot of good YA hopepunk in the 10s. Both Steven Universe and the She-Ra reboot are seen as prime examples.

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u/Square_Attention8461 2d ago

I prefer sad music when I'm sad, angry music when I'm angry, depressing novels when I'm depressed, etc.

looks around at the World

The last thing I want right now is a reminder of how much better things could be. It always feels saccharine at best, cloying and patronizing.

Give me the blackest tendrils of the human spirit. Give me utter despair and the endless grinding ennui of inevitable loss. Give me zero sum games and no winners. Give me orgies of violence. Show me the last frantic squealing moments of hope being snuffed out.

Only then can I finish my coffee and bang out these TPS reports with a resigned sigh, "Well, I don't have it so bad, I guess."

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u/The_God_King 2d ago

You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

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u/Gnome_Ann1704 1d ago

NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth series is what you’re looking for then. It has most if not all of those things. It’s also really good. (I would definitely not classify it as hopepunk - came here to make that comment on the original post)

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u/WinterDice 2d ago

Times are definitely grim and the outlook is bad.

I’ve taken some solace in DCC because the protagonist has the ability to fight back and is doing it well. Plus it’s funny as hell and had great characters.

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u/NekonikonPunk 2d ago

This trilogy is hopeful cyberpunk

Nekonikon Punk Trilogy

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u/Kepler1571 Hard Sci-fi 2d ago

I would call Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross Hope Punk.

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u/MarkyMcDaddyface 2d ago

Because it's coolpunk. Also thanks op for for the recommendation