Resource: Is Hopepunk a Thing?

The BBC thinks so. See their blog post titled The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.

Annalee Newitz thinks Hopepunk is not a genre, saying that any story can have elements of hope.

My 2 cents is that we need a counterbalance to all the dystopian stuff in popular culture and much recent speculative fiction. Whether Hopepunk is a genre, subgenre, or something else is beside the point.

And Off on a Tangent

A challenge to writing hopeful stories (or dystopian stories for that matter) is to do it without including too many “peanuts of pathos.” See Bloom County by Berke Breathed for details – dystopia at its finest.

References

Breathed, Berkely. (2009). Bloom County: The Complete Digital Edition – Volume 1: 1980-1981. IDW Publishing. [Reproduced for a fair dealing purpose – Buy your copy here – https://www.amazon.ca/County-Digital-Library-County-Complete-ebook/dp/B007KDEHOU/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=]

Burt, Kayti. (2019). A Hopepunk Guide: Interview with Annalee Newitz. Den of Geek. https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/a-hopepunk-guide-interview-with-annalee-newitz/

Robson, David. (2022). The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220113-the-sci-fi-genre-offering-radical-hope-for-living-better