Hopepunk

“Hopepunk” as a subgenre was born on Tumblr in 2017. There, fantasy author Alexandra Rowland gave her readers a simple yet powerful directive: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.” Since then, a host of science fiction and fantasy works (published both before and after 2017) have been given the label, alerting potential readers to the fact that the story they’ve picked up will include some/many optimistic elements of community, friendship, utopian drive, and, yes, hope. As Rowland herself wrote two years later about the subgenre, hopepunk imagines that the glass is half-full; it “says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.” Related to hopepunk, solarpunk takes an often-optimistic approach to climate change and humanity’s adaptation to it, further developing a subgenre that offers readers more than “grimdark” negativity. With hopepunk, the future looks brighter.

Alexandra Rowland

A Conspiracy of Truths

Saga Press, 2018

Written by the creator of hopepunk herself, A Conspiracy of Truths is a sci-fi fantasy about a traveling storyteller making his way across a far-northern landscape who finds himself captured by a corrupt kingdom and labeled a witch and spy. Realizing that he’s fallen into a complex political situation and is being used as a scapegoat, Chant relies on what he knows best—stories—to free both himself and the kingdom’s oppressed people. Conspiracy is a story about stories and how they can change the world.

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Saga Press, 2019

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella 2019, and the Hugo Award for Best Novella 2020, This Is How You Lose the Time War imagines that two warring factions are fighting for control of history. After centuries of this, the world has fallen into ruin, and nothing looks like it’s going to change until two rival agents start leaving messages for each other. At first, they’re taunting (“Burn before reading”) and snide, but soon the rivalry doesn’t seem as important as learning more about the other. Eventually, something almost like love blossoms amid the fighting, and this just might make a difference in ending the war.

Becky Chambers

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

Harper Voyager, 2019

Sent to explore exoplanets fifteen light-years away from Earth, Chambers’s crew must fight against loneliness and danger in order to fulfill their mission. Leaving behind all of humanity was hard, but dealing with strange creatures (sluglike rats, etc.) and never knowing what’s around the “corner” takes a toll. Despite all of this, the crewmembers lean on one another for support, keeping faith in their mission to explore new worlds without colonizing or disrupting them in any way. Chambers’s Wayfarers series explores similar themes with a hopepunk slant.

Francesco Verso

The Roamers

Trans. Sally McCorry

Flame Tree Press, 2023

Francesco Verso

No/Mad/Land

Trans. Sally McCorry

Flame Tree Press, 2024

Italian author, editor, and publisher Francesco Verso has done more than most to champion speculative fiction around the world and across languages. With his Future Fiction publishing venture, Verso introduces readers in Italy and around the world to some of the most exciting new science fiction, especially when it relates to our environmental future. His own duology, The Walkers, imagines that humans have started using nanotechnology, solar energy, and other green technologies to create a sustainable world for all humans. Verso doesn’t ask us to unquestioningly embrace these shifts but to consider what we are willing to change about ourselves in order to live well on, and in harmony with, this planet and one another. Called a “kind of biopunk utopia” by Gary Wolfe (Locus), The Walkers follows an earlier work—an anthology of Portuguese solarpunk stories edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro—that includes a couple of hopepunk-like tales of evolution and adaptation. Verso’s own eponymous anthology of solarpunk came out in 2014.

Sung-il Kim

Blood of the Old Kings (The Bleeding Empire, Volume 1)

Trans. Anton Hur

Tor, 2024

Korean author Sung-il Kim has given us a work of high fantasy set in a world governed by a version of the Roman Empire. Oppressive, seemingly inevitable, and cruel, the empire has crushed the kingdoms it has conquered, rounding up any humans or other creatures with magical powers. Sorcerers are sent to a special school where they are taught just enough useless information to keep them occupied until they die, whereupon they are put in the basement and used as power generators to light up the capital. The empire is more fragile than it seems, however, as rebellions start breaking out across the kingdoms and three people (a swordswoman, a poor merchant, and an escaped sorcerer) find one another and try to break the empire’s hold without destroying themselves and their kingdoms in the process.