For some reason, I don’t hear the term “hopepunk” all that often. If it’s a subgenre at all, it’s one that’s a bit vaguely defined, and often conflated with “cozy.”

To me, hopepunk is SFF that is optimistic at its core, imagining better worlds or tracing a path from a worse world to a better one. Star Trek is the archetypal example: it imagines space travel as being about discovery and peace, rather than exploring a hostile universe which requires us to unleash our worst selves to survive.

Not all hopepunk is sci-fi, though that’s more common. Optimistic fantasy that focuses on building a better world can be hopepunk too.

Hopepunk isn’t cozy

There’s some overlap between cozy and hopepunk. Both are optimistic and uplifting, without a lot of darkness in them. But cozy books avoid tense action plots, and they tend to eschew suspense in favor of quiet, peaceful scenes. Hopepunk, conversely, fits more into the usual plot structure of sci-fi and fantasy: action scenes, suspense, and peril. These aren’t books about starting a bakery or running a library, but something a bit more plot-heavy.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that a few cozy scenes make a book not hopepunk anymore. If a book has a plot that drives the book, with real potential for failure, it’s probably better labeled as hopepunk than cozy.

That distinction is important, because readers come to cozy for a gentle, calming time without a lot of peril, while readers who want action tend to avoid anything labeled as cozy. That’s why I think the term hopepunk should be used more, instead of folding these books in with cozy books, where they’re less likely to find the right readers.

Hopepunk isn’t utopia

While hopepunk tends to avoid grim dystopias, that doesn’t mean it has to be utopian either. Utopia is very difficult to write, for a few reasons. First of all, it can feel implausible. Human history is full of a lot of awful ways people have lived, but fewer good ones, and none that are perfect. So readers can have trouble suspending their disbelief that flawed humans would ever live like that. On top of that, people rarely agree on what a perfect society would look like. You can make your ideal, but readers are likely to find fault with it because it’s not their ideal.

Finally, it’s harder to have a high-stakes plot in a utopia. If things are so good, shouldn’t we have few worries? The main plot that suggests itself is, “Our utopia is threatened, and we defeat the threat in defense of the status quo,” but that’s a plot that often fails to land well with the readers of today. After all, at best you end up where you started. And today’s readers are used to a status quo that we don’t want to preserve, so we often feel suspicious of people whose only goal is to keep things the way that they are.

Fortunately, that’s not what hopepunk has to be. Some hopepunk books do describe a very nice future, if not a perfect one. Others start out with a pretty bad situation and work toward a better one. The point is that it’s optimistic, not that we’re there already. Books about revolutions, liberation, or establishing new societies can be hopepunk.

Hopepunk is usually progressive

The conservative worldview tends to be a cynical one. “The way things have always been is as good as they’re going to get. We shouldn’t try to fix all the problems in our world, or we’ll end up with something worse.” Progressivism is the idea that our situation can be improved, that increased knowledge and new structures can create a better world.

That’s the root of hopepunk: the idea that we don’t have to settle for what we’ve got, but can build better things. Freer governments, kinder societies, worlds where no one gets left behind.

The good hopepunk I’ve encountered has centered around questions like, 

• How do we free ourselves from oppressive systems?
• How can we build societies that are equitable and at peace?
• If we met aliens, could we cooperate with them to leave both of us better off?
• What futures can we imagine better than how we live today?

These are ultimately progressive questions, resulting in a largely (if not universally) progressive genre.

A few examples

I’ve already mentioned Star Trek, and if you’re familiar with my work, you know pretty much everything I write is in this subgenre. But here are a few more:

The Murderbot Diaries: The world is dystopian, but the focus is on kind people showing up for each other, and the cure for the problems is in care and cooperation.

We Built This City, by Marie Vibbert: What’s more hopepunk than union struggle on Venus?

Good Omens: In which an angel and a demon believe in the power of humanity to shape their own destiny, and help create a future for them.

Project Hail Mary: The combined powers of science and friendship save the day.

The Past Is Red, by Catherynne Valente: Post-apocalyptic, but new things can be built on these trash islands.

Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell: Rebuilding after climate disaster.

The appeal

Hopepunk may be my absolute favorite subgenre. Life is hard, things don’t always go well in real life, and reading about coffee shops doesn’t really make me feel any better. But stories where people come together and solve their society’s problems always give me hope. Cynicism isn’t any more “realistic” than optimism: humanity genuinely can go either way.

I say a lot that we have to be able to imagine a future before we can create it. We sketch out a potential path from where we are to where we want to be. We tell ourselves stories of how we could make it happen, what our obstacles will be, how we’ll handle those. And that helps us keep our eyes open for opportunities to do the same in real life.

Not that I’m only reading hopepunk books as an act of virtue. I’m mainly reading them because they’re fun. In a world full of things going wrong, it soothes my soul to imagine them going right.

Announcements

There’s a lot going on this month, which I need to make sure to tell you about!

• Related to this post, I’m in an itch bundle called A Better World which is the exact thing I’m talking about—books where people create a better world.
• I’m also in a Kobo Plus promo, a collection of fantasy and sci-fi books which are free to read for Kobo+ subscribers. I heartily recommend the service; there are tons of indie books to choose from, and this past summer I’ve read 37 books for a cost of only eight bucks a month. Much more than I could have afforded to buy outright.
• Today begins my Nonbinary Heroes Sale, with 9 books by various authors, all featuring nonbinary characters, and each for under $3.