Light In the Interstices between Dystopia and Utopia, or, Why I Love Hopepunk

It may seem inconsistent that a writer such as myself who is a huge devotee of the speculative fiction subgenre known as hopepunk would be irresistibly drawn to dark and gritty stories. I mean, isn’t hopepunk about hope, and isn’t hope bright and happy? Yet, even as a child, I was drawn to the tales that took place in the shadows of glass and metal buildings, away from fantasies of two-car garages and well-fed, obedient children. These stories, I believed, would help me to understand a reality I sensed but rarely saw acknowledged, a reality our authority figures, mainstream news sources, and entertainment media seemed to conspire to keep hidden: that the “good life” being touted and supposedly accessible to all might not only be an empty and meaningless promise, but built on the suffering of others.At the same time, I also craved more hopeful tales that presented the possibility of a positive world, with people living satisfying and fulfilling lives in community and solidarity, where the happiness of one sector of society was not dependent on the oppression of another. Although it was easy enough to find stories that satisfied my craving for dark fiction, I found it more challenging to find stories that spoke to my desire for positive social depictions that might inspire a better world. Dystopian worlds seemed to be a dime a dozen, but utopian worlds were harder to come by, even in our collective imaginations.Don’t get me wrong: it makes sense that dystopian fiction is a popular and wide-ranging genre. I am reminded of the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” While I’m not sure I agree with the first part of this pronouncement, the second part resonates, not just in relation to families but to societies. There are, after all, so many ways for a world to be broken.Yet, don’t we need hopeful stories, too? In his article in The Nation, titled “Utopia and Dystopia Are Twins—Both Are Born Out of Criticism” (July 26–August 2, 2021), author Jeet Heer remarks upon the recent dominance of dystopian stories at the expense of utopian ones,1 quoting literary theorist Fredric Jameson: “It seems to be easier for us to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness of our imagination.”2 Commenting on the importance of utopian literature in his 1891 book, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”3I do think that I understand, at least in part, why utopian stories are relatively rare, or even dismissed as boring. If dystopian literature can be relentlessly grim, showing us a destination to be avoided rather than one to sail toward, utopian stories can often seem static and unchanging, having reached “perfection,” or unrealistic and fantastical, a place toward which the vessels of our world can never truly navigate. But what if one were to pair the grim realities captured in our dystopian fiction with the hopeful possibilities of our best dreams? Perhaps such a pairing is what we need to truly begin sailing in the right direction.This is where hopepunk fiction comes in. By combining hopeful outcomes with a punk context and sensibility, hopepunk stories can be gritty, challenging, and realistic, but still provide the reader with the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel. Hopepunk is one of a long list of speculative fiction subgenres that includes the suffix “punk.” Some other examples include cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk, mannerpunk, dieselpunk, biopunk, nanopunk, elfpunk, and mythpunk—though arguably, the “punk” aspect of some of the genres on this list is less obvious than it is for others.Certain commentators mistakenly believe that hopepunk was conceived as a reaction to the original punk genre: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, a contraction of cybernetics and punk, generally has as its setting a grim, hyper-capitalist and corporatist world in which many people are forced to live in the margins, barely surviving in a society characterized by oppressive and ubiquitous cyber technologies, savage economic inequalities, and broken dreams. In reality, cyberpunk and hopepunk are less antipodes than they are sibling genres, related both in mood and in a common point-of-view. Like cyberpunk, the punk part of the compound word “hopepunk” signals that the point-of-view of the story is that of an outsider resisting authority, capitalism, and the disintegration of our human and social rights. Another important point is that while cyberpunk stories are sometimes dystopian, and usually written in a noir literary style, they can have relatively hopeful endings, including some of the stories of William Gibson, a parent of the cyberpunk genre.Hopepunk was, in fact, conceived to counter a different speculative fiction subgenre: grimdark. The term hopepunk was coined by writer Alexandra Rowland in a popular Tumblr post that read, “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.”4 It is important to note that not only don’t they claim that hopepunk is the opposite of cyberpunk, but they also do not say that hopepunk is the opposite of dystopian fiction—because it isn’t. Like dystopian stories, hopepunk is social criticism, and as such, it springs out of caring for the world along with the belief that it can be improved. Grimdark, on the other hand, is more like nihilism, a philosophy grounded in the assumption that everyone is evil, nobody cares, nothing matters. Grimdark stories are dismal and hopeless, but it’s not the grimness that sets it in opposition to hopepunk, it’s the hopelessness.Hopepunk is very different from another speculative fiction subgenre known as noblebright. In noblebright tales, good triumphs over evil in narratives characterized by heroes, generally male and White who, due to their extraordinary strengths and abilities, are able to save the rest of us from the forces of evil. In contrast, if there is a narrative of good triumphing over evil in hopepunk, it is the result of a collective response, and the group of “heroes,” if they can be labelled as such, are outsiders, flawed as we all are, living on the margins of society and pushing back against authority, ingrained power, and structural injustice. For this reason, while noblebright is often said to be the opposite of grimdark, hopepunk is its true opposite, in the same sense that indifference, not hate, is the more profound opposite of love. I would further argue that grimdark and noblebright, as literary genres, suffer from the same flaw: that of the binary where you are either one thing (dark) or the other (bright), or if we were to indulge in a binary, they are two sides of the same coin. Hopepunk is interesting because it contains both “sides” on one surface, so to speak. The punk part of the term lets the reader know that we are going to be shown a gritty and often dark world of struggle and marginalization; the hope part lets us know that there will be light too, that all is not necessarily lost.My attraction to stories containing both light and dark predates hopepunk. It began with my attraction to both dystopian and utopian literature and my desire to somehow get a taste of both of them in the same tale. I can’t remember which novel I read first: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin or Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Written within two years of one another—1974 and 1976, respectively—these two books blew my mind, and in so doing, showed me the kind of stories I’d been hungering for all along. They are also, in my opinion, precursors to the hopepunk genre that was to blossom forty years later.Le Guin’s novel, which in later printings was titled The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, presents the reader, in alternating chapters, with two worlds: one that is somewhat utopian and another that is somewhat dystopian. Meanwhile, Piercy’s book also presents two worlds, or actually, three. Through the frame story of a poor, marginalized, racialized woman unjustly confined to a mental institution and in danger of being lobotomized, the reader is later introduced to two potential versions of the future. One is a society that, like Le Guin’s Anarres, is utopian but not perfect; the other is dystopian in a frightening, proto-cyberpunk kind of way. In re-reading the book in later years, it occurred to me that it is the “real” world the main character inhabits in the frame story that is, in some ways, the most horrifying.An interesting but not well-known fact for those who mistakenly believe that cyberpunk and hopepunk are at odds with one another is that Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is credited by some as being the first novel to include cyberpunk, and is cited by William Gibson himself as an influence on his own work.5 Piercy, who generally writes realistic contemporary fiction rather than science fiction, did return to the speculative fiction genre in 1991 to write He, She and It, a fully cyberpunk novel that also has the characteristics of hopepunk.What struck me about The Dispossessed and Woman on the Edge of Time and what made me love them both so fiercely was that they offer the reader a positive, creative, satisfying vision of a society that is good enough to earn the description “utopian.” Yet, at the same time, the story we read is not all rainbows and unicorns. Dystopia is there too, in the planet next door or the nation across the ocean, in the ashes from which this better world has sprung, and if we are not careful, just over the horizon. In these two novels, there is and has been struggle, and to keep the good world alive, more struggle, or at least watchfulness, continues to be necessary. This duality not only makes the story feel realistic, it renders the utopian aspects more organic, while sharpening its brightness and underlying its urgency.Stories that embody both darkness and light feel more satisfying to me. Perhaps it is an aesthetic or artistic preference. I think of chiaroscuro, a visual arts technique that uses sharp contrasts between dark and light to suggest depth and volume. The term, whose origin is Italian, literally means light-dark. Not merely a method to suggest depth in three-dimensional objects, it is also used to heighten dramatic tension in drawings, paintings, etchings, and films. It is easy to see how such a technique adapts itself to the art of literature. Without both darkness and light, the worldbuilding would lack depth. In addition, as Le Guin herself said in her novel The Farthest Shore, “To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.”6 And the darker the place, the brighter, the more dramatic that light appears.This artistic explanation for why, aesthetically speaking, I am drawn to dark-light stories, rings true. At the same time, there is a simpler reason that novels containing both dystopian and utopian elements are so powerful to me. Simply put, when writers incorporate dystopian elements of our societies into their worldbuilding before introducing utopian aspects, they make their stories more authentic, and the hopeful aspects more earned. This helps me to suspend my disbelief long enough to open myself up to legitimate hope. In other words, by presenting both a dystopia and utopia, a critique and a possible response, in showing us grittiness along with beauty, these novels allow us to believe in the dream that our real-life broken world can be likewise transformed. These are the kinds of stories that inspired me, first as a reader and then later as a writer.My first novel, Cycling to Asylum, a work of proto-hopepunk published in 2014, was greatly influenced by Le Guin and Piercy’s work. I set out to tell the story of two political activists forced to flee their home in New York who cycle across the border with their kids to seek asylum in Montréal. In the story, I wanted to show hope, a path to a better society that could be forged through collective social action, but I knew the novel also required dark or dystopian elements in order to expose the dangerous, repressive aspects of our society. By using Montréal and New York to represent these utopian/dystopian elements, I was unconsciously replicating Le Guin’s Anarres and Urras, and Piercy’s tale of two possible futures fighting for reality.Like my literary heroes, Le Guin and Piercy, I cannot ignore the darkness. I cannot pretend it doesn’t exist, doesn’t form us, doesn’t hurt us or even sometimes strengthen us. We must bear it in mind, and we must bear it on our shoulders, carrying its weight forward. Yet, we need to have hope too and stories of imaginary worlds that help nourish that hope. When, three years after my novel was published, Alexandra Rowland coined the term “hopepunk,” I realized that I had found my genre, and I continue to be a strong advocate for the importance of hopepunk in the literary landscape. Yet, when I first began talking about hopepunk, some people misunderstood (as certain critics of the genre have done and continue to do), believing hopepunk to be overly optimistic, full of Pollyannas unable to face the cold, harsh realities of life. This misinterpretation is likely based on ignoring the “punk” part of the term.The punk subgenres take their inspiration from the punk rock scene that originated in the mid-1970’s to reject the corporate nature of rock music and to instead produce work that was hard-edged, anti-establishment, and anti-authoritarian. Punk culture comes from the margins, rejects conformity and materialism, uses direct action, and believes in a do-it-yourself ethic. Another element that is important to both the punk culture and to the similarly named literary genre is a strong sense of community. This is not a community of happy, comfortable people living easy lives and accepting the status quo. Rather, it is a community of people fighting for social change.Punk is about struggle and opposition, not about pretending that everything is okay. It is seeing that everything is not okay but refusing to give up. It is about fighting and pushing back as much as it is about radical kindness. Returning to Rowland’s original post: “. . . the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, ‘The glass is half empty.’ Hopepunk says, ‘No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.’”7 In my opinion, a genre whose inaugural description includes the words “Go fuck yourself” cannot be fairly characterized as soft and fluffy.Two years later, although the author who first wrote about half-full glasses seemed more discouraged by the world than ever, she also, like me, still believed in hopepunk. In a piece published by The Stellar Beacon in 2019, Alexandra Rowland has this to say in writing about the subgenre: “It’s about digging in your heels and believing that one single atom of justice, one molecule of mercy does exist somewhere in the mindboggling vastness of the universe. . . . It’s about doing the one little thing you can do, even if it’s useless. . . . Hope and strength comes from our bonds with each other, from the actions we take as a community, holding hands in the dark. . . . 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. . . . 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.”8Finally—and this is what distinguishes the genre of hopepunk from these earlier dual-genre mashups—hopepunk fiction is characterized by the specific means needed to reach our goals, and the types of tools that are coherent with these means. In hopepunk, the protagonists are accessing a very particular toolbox, a toolbox that includes resistance and critical thinking; activism and struggle; community, inclusion, and solidarity. An important thing to note is that such tools are meant to be used by groups of people working together, not by one lone hero with perhaps a few of his sidekicks standing behind him.For example, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 ecological hopepunk novel The Ministry for the Future, there are a whole cast of characters—activists, scientists, politicians, plus an entire ministry—who work together to try to save the world not only from climate catastrophe, chillingly portrayed, but also to move us toward greater economic and environmental justice. Similarly, in The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet (2014), Becky Chambers presents a multi-species crew who band together to try to make things right. In another excellent hopepunk novel, The Future of Another Timeline (2019), Annalee Newitz has created a group of characters who use a diversity of tactics (as is done in real activism) to fight misogyny and the forces of regression. Hopepunk novels such as these demonstrate that the tools of activism, of social change, function best when employed by people standing shoulder to shoulder, with clear eyes and open hearts. The tools of struggle can be heavy and hard to employ alone. We need to one to the weight of the most important of these tools is, of hope. If can help dystopian it’s hope that utopian dreams. do what to be we need And that, more than is why I’d like to see more not just in our fiction but in our

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