Cyberpunk, Hopepunk, and Beyond
by Joshua Fagan
Stories pursue truth. A narrative that feels sentimental and cloying, portraying the triumph of the pure and just over heartless, cackling evil will not resonate beyond an audience of schoolchildren because it does not convey truth. The same is true of a narrative that portrays humanity as universally corrupt and heartless, caring only for material gain and rejecting community and compassion. These two poles, while ostensibly different, make the same error: their worldview rings false. Their basic vision of the world does not register as accurate. Though stories rely on fictitious elements, these elements serve to convey a greater and more philosophical truth. The debate about cyberpunk and hopepunk is largely a debate over what resonates as true.
Cyberpunk has many ancestors, from Japanese anime and manga to underground, experimental French comics. The Los Angeles Review of Books ran a comprehensive article in 2021 detailing the debt cyberpunk owes to graphic novels around the world, arguing that the experimental space afforded by those comics encouraged the proliferation of haunting, patently non-mainstream visions of corporate-controlled nightmare worlds, forming the foundation for cyberpunk. Still, cyberpunk in the English-speaking world largely owes its foundation to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released in 1982, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, released in 1984. These two sources largely define what the average person thinks of when they think of cyberpunk as a genre: lurid, flashing lights contrasted against grime-soaked, crime-ridden streets, unchecked corporate power infiltrating the most intimate and personal spaces, and existential questions about the difference between the organic and the artificial in such a disorienting and overstimulating world.
That cyberpunk remains influential does not necessarily mean it has flourished. The cyberpunk aesthetic—one part Tokyo, one part noir, one part Las Vegas—has perhaps become too popular to stimulate the creativity that once defined the genre. There are still great cyberpunk works being made, such as the ethereally existential Blade Runner 2049, released in 2017, but too often cyberpunk becomes only an aesthetic, a familiar set of tropes and conventions. This familiarity affects middling works in the genre, such as the largely forgotten show Altered Carbon, but it also affects even grandiose blockbuster videogames like Cyberpunk 2077, a game that diligently attempted to be thoughtful and philosophical but ultimately did little that the masterworks of the genre, from Blade Runner to Akira, had not already done better.
Gibson, in his cyberpunk novels, attempted to demonstrate that “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” It pairs an ostensibly exciting future with the sobering revelation that only a select few would benefit from this future. Still, many works of cyberpunk allow the exotic glamor of the aesthetic to obscure any politically or philosophically salient points, and even works like Cyberpunk 2077 that take the implications of cyberpunk more seriously lack the streamlined focus of Gibson or Scott. The omnipresence of cyberpunk has transformed it from being a radical, avant-garde movement to an established aesthetic often associated with cynicism and somber pessimism. In a cyberpunk world, little improves or changes for the better, earning the genre the ire of those who refuse to believe in such a bleak vision of the future. Artists with ardent activist sensibilities understandably seek alternatives to the cyberpunk understanding of postmodern commercial society.
A flurry of more optimistic “punk” subgenres has thus flourished in the last ten to fifteen years. The most famous of these is probably solarpunk, a term coined in 2008 to refer to a future combining technological advancement with avid environmentalism. Renewable energy often features in these stories, but they typically focus less on technology and more on sociology. Solar panels do not themselves make a story solarpunk. The “punk” ethos of rejecting hierarchical authority and commercialism, embracing a rougher but truer perception of the world, remains emphasized. Solarpunk details how new communities can live sustainably and ethically, taking inspiration from the ecologies of lakes and forests, embracing interdependence and mutual reliability.
These stories are not always necessarily activist or utopian, and the definition of the term is broad enough that it can include anything from Art Nouveau-inspired organically futuristic designs to movies like Nausicaa, but they tend in a more radical direction. Solarpunk Magazine, for instance, adamantly states that “we need more literature that demands utopia.” Rhys Williams gives one of the most concise definitions of solarpunk, arguing that it creates “imagined worlds as clear figures of a desire for a socially just and ecologically harmonious social organization.” Solarpunk engages in a dialogue with cyberpunk, tweaking but not wholly rejecting it. Gibson in “The Gernsback Continuum” gives a delightfully acidic critique of the triumphalist techno-futurism that animated pulp sci-fi. Solarpunk, accepting that critique as valid, attempts to kindle a different kind of optimism, and in its wake, a variety of different “punk” movements have emerged, taking the radical optimism of solarpunk in new directions.
From this rebellion came the category of “hopepunk.” Coined on Tumblr in 2017 by Alexandra Rowland as the “opposite of grimdark,” it is a rather capacious category defined by the hope that considerate people, despite the grim difficulties they face, can create a better world by working together. Hopepunk can admittedly seem vague, lacking even the general aesthetic characteristics of solarpunk. Still, like cyberpunk at its best, what defines hopepunk more than a specific set of tropes is a general attitude. Hopepunk believes in community and the courage to confront difficult situations. It believes in an imperfect and hard-won but ultimately satisfying future. Rejecting the image of the ideal, chrome-and-glass future provided by corporations or charismatic individuals, hopepunk believes in a flawed but beautiful tomorrow won by ordinary individuals exercising selflessness and compassion.
Not every hopepunk story counts as solarpunk, but most solarpunk stories count as hopepunk. A 2019 Den of Geek article, “Are You Afraid of the Darkness?: A Hopepunk Explainer,” gives varied examples of hopepunk, ranging from Mad Max: Fury Road to Snowpiercer. These are feel-good stories for a feel-bad age that too often wallows in despair, or roughly what Modest Mouse called “good news from people who love bad news.”
Certainly, there is much commendable about hopepunk. In an age defined by an overstimulation of distressing headlines, hopepunk definitively argues that gloom, while temporarily cathartic, does not solve climate change or any major social problem. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, an expansive saga of terraforming and colonizing Mars that acknowledges the influence of governmental corruption and corporate power but depicts them as forces that determined and thoughtful communities can overcome, shines as a beacon of what solarpunk and hopepunk storytelling can accomplish. William Morris, the late nineteenth-century polymath and the grandfather to this kind of storytelling, combined an ardent opposition to the uprooting, lifeless unease created by mass production and utilitarianism with an imaginative willingness to create new worlds inspired by ideas of egalitarian community and interrelatedness.
Still, the rising emphasis on hopepunk storytelling is not beyond criticism. Robust hopepunk works may deplore easy answers and sentimentality, but it nonetheless emphasizes the eventual triumph of virtue. Hopepunk relies on uplifting messages and morals. It models good behavior in a fallen world. At its worst, the genre sinks into complacency, reminiscent of the kind of “activist” self-care that views spending time with friends and quitting a bad job as daring rebellion. There is nothing wrong with attempting to heal a wounded psyche, but though those wounds may derive from an avaricious and mechanistic society, healing them does not equal radicalism. A 2018 Vox article implies that giving another award to N.K. Jemisin constitutes hopepunk and activism. Even the Den of Geek article implies that hopepunk “is a vital ingredient to the recipe to change.”
This attitude, while superficially harmless and even uplifting, has unsettling implications. In the minds of its most ardent proponents, hopepunk is not just a narrative about moral people trying to do what is right in a difficult world, but a fundamentally moral way of storytelling. It inculcates virtue. There is nothing wrong with happy endings and righteous protagonists, provided they are not cheaply sentimental or oversimplistic. Hopepunk over-enthusiasts err, though, when they tie the worth of a narrative to its capacity to offer a model for resistance and activism. Cyberpunk narratives, whatever their faults, never default to this moral absolutism. They never assert that stories should make their audiences feel upstanding and clean, providing a blueprint for collective action. They understand that sorrow, anxiety, and unease belong to art not merely as passing phases to be subsumed under the tide of optimism, but as important ideas deserving of mature exploration.
Perhaps stories like Blade Runner offer too few answers and wallow in gloom. But perhaps hopepunk stories offer too many answers and embrace neat resolutions. Gibson acridly decried Singapore, a welcoming and glamorous state built by the unyielding, arguably authoritarian vision of one man, as “Disneyland with the death penalty.” This perspective, while reductive, fits the anti-authoritarian cynicism of Gibson’s vision. What should a hopepunk writer think of Singapore, which elevated its people from abject poverty to prosperity in one generation at the partial cost of personal freedom? Fraught and murky, such an issue cannot be resolved by the hopepunk paradigm of good-hearted people working against a cruel world. Great art reflects the messiness of life, instead of viewing that messiness as a problem to solve.
There is nothing wrong with writing hopepunk. There is nothing wrong with writing cyberpunk. Both express truth. Neither expresses the complete and total truth, as no one perspective can. The artistic environment flourishes when it accepts that a plurality of well-considered perspectives have significance. Artists relentlessly pursue truth, but what truth means differs depending on individual viewpoints. For some writers, cyberpunk rings false, emphasizing only gloom. For others, hopepunk rings false, emphasizing only cheer and optimism. No amount of discussion will resolve a division that comes primarily from a difference in worldviews. Still, both sides can commit themselves to the common ideal of all artists: to use visceral, vibrant details to communicate a psychological intensity of vision that overwhelms the indifference and apathy created by routine and convention. That vision, not a cool aesthetic or a desire to morally educate, is what creates art of enduring value.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.