Why I write Hopepunk
My first book was specifically intended as utopian literature. My second wasn’t.
I wrote The World As It Ought to Be because I was freaking out from the horrors in the news, and the only thing that kept me relatively calm was reading utopian stories. I wanted more than happy endings; I wanted happy endings for a whole community, not just for individual characters. But I couldn’t find enough of them — a side effect of reading fast, which I’ve always done. So, when I ran out, I made my own.
It ended up being protopian instead of utopian — the difference is that protopian stories are about people still working for a good society instead of already having one — because I craved realism. I wanted to know it was possible to build a good society. Far-future or magical utopias did not help me… I needed to feel like it was something we could do here. I didn’t even know the word hopepunk yet. I was just writing what I wanted to read.
I have been reading science fiction for a very long time. I remember when it was, almost by definition, a positive field. The entire point was to show the amazing things humans could do in the future, if they only kept trying. If they leveraged their talent for technological invention in ways that were actually good for them, and for the environments they occupied.
The first traces of the current dystopian movement was the post-apocalyptic craze, and even that had a pretty strong positive element. I don’t claim to be a scholar of the field, but the ones I remember best treated even terrible apocalypse as a cleansing wave; a means of shaking up an entrenched system so that something better might have a chance to get started.
I learned, while researching Paleomythic, that the planet often treats mass extinctions that way, too. They’re terrible, for those who are going through it. But they make way for new innovation, and sometimes some pretty interesting things come out of that. I’ve tried to show both sides: the horror and loss, and the innovation that follows. Is it worth it? I don’t know. Depends, probably, on the details — what, exactly, was lost, and what replaced it. But at least there’s an opportunity.
That’s what makes me write hopepunk, I think: that sense of opportunity. Without it, I can’t find a story worth telling. It’s just grimness. And unrelenting grimness doesn’t have conflict, or progression, or a beginning, middle and end. It doesn’t have all those things that any writer will tell you are necessary parts of story.
So I write hope — even when I don’t mean to. Paleomythic was never intended to be hopepunk. In fact, if you read it alone, you won’t think it is. It’s not grim, it’s just… history, the way it was for the entities who were there. The rest of the trilogy will be where most of the hopepunk lives. But it’s still one combined story arc, even if I’ve tried to make each book readable independently. And — spoiler alert — it still makes its way into hope eventually.
I’m not a natural optimist. But I am a disciplined optimist. I deliberately keep focused on the good things that might happen because I’m a lot happier when I do that… and because the good things can only happen if people can still imagine them. I guess that’s why the good things actually keep happening in my work — even if it sometimes takes a while! I want readers to see what that looks like. I want them to feel like there’s a point to going out and trying to make it happen in the real world. Even when it’s not what I plan on, it’s where my head is, so it’s where my words go.
A friend of mine wrote an incredible song about the science fiction and fantasy world, including the line “You know this is what our tales are for/
To teach ourselves that there’s so much more
That we can be…”¹ That feels like what I write, anyhow. It’s what I wrote on purpose in The World As It Ought to Be. It’s not necessarily what I intended to write in Paleomythic, but the trilogy has swung in that direction anyhow. I’m not sorry it did.
¹ “We Are Who We Are,” by Michelle ‘Vixy’ Dockrey
