HOPE PUNK: HOW SCIENCE FICTION WRITTEN BY WOMEN CAN HELP US ORGANIZE FOR A LIVABLE WORLD
1. Introduction:
The ultimate intention of this paper is to explore science fiction written by women and how, through history, women have been using science fiction to think about subjective ways to empower change. In the first half of this work, the definition of what has been popularly understood as science fiction, and some counterpoints to its nomenclature will be discussed.
Along with that, a brief description of aspects of what science fiction written by women has been telling us in terms of world-building, and a description of what were some of the demands of women authors from the 17th to 20th century, will be presented, with the goal of laying a base to contextualize the reader of such themes.
Moving forward in the text, there will be an introduction to the concept of hopepunk and what are some of its elements. This will lead to the presentation of works by Octavia E. Butler, Becky Chambers, and Ling Ma, which will be explored along with the hopepunk elements of said stories. Finally, I will conclude the paper by presenting how such works denunciate and try to offer subjective alternatives as a way of beginning to tackle current global problems such as climate change and social inequality.
2. Delineating science fiction
In a broad sense, the science fiction genre can be defined as stories written with the goal of wonder -- not without the restriction of the realm of reality as the fantasy genre stories, some authors will argue -- but in the sense of imagining about different scenarios, conjunctures, and worlds that could have been a reality, or can still take shape.
These stories typically imagine the potential consequences powered by new scientific advances, technologies, policies, and legislation on various aspects of human life. The range of scenarios and topics have created a vast number of subgenres of science fiction, ones which have become more widely known, through popular culture, than others, such as Space Operas or Solarpunk.
For writer and scholar Joanna Russ, science fiction can be described as What If literature, as she proposes, there are two essential elements in the definition of science fiction, which are The What If and The Serious Explanation (Russ, 2007). Russ also says that science fiction presents aspects of life not as they normally are, but instead, as they can potentially be. She explains that once the author presents the scenario of what might be, they have to provide a reasonable explanation that cannot go against widely known aspects of scientific knowledge -- such as gravity, time and space, the existence of the sun, or that the earth is round.
In this sense, science fiction is speculative fiction, once it reads the world it is located in and proposes scenarios that might have not been considered previously. The idea of science fiction as speculative fiction is not new by any chance, and in fact, a lot of writers in the field prefer that their writing be referred to as speculative fiction instead of science fiction. One example of said writers is Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
The preference for the term “speculative” instead of “science” when referring to this type of fiction can take place for a variety of reasons. One of them, explained by Margaret Atwood herself is that she wants her stories to be differentiated from squids in space as the author explained in an interview that she gave for the British Television channel BBC in 2012.
This apparent need to differentiate the author's work from space operas, the subgenre of science fiction that explores space travels and encounters with otherworldly species, seems to come from a place of wanting to express that Atwood’s work is focused on scenarios that take place on the social fabric of planet earth, as her books on religious dystopias, such as The Handmaid's Tale extensively suggest. The impression that social aspects presented in speculative/science fiction are an uncommon thing, or even an aspect that would differentiate speculative from science fiction and other literary genres is a known one.
This brings us to the fact that science fiction does not exclusively stream from STEM, it also streams from the social sciences and humanity field. It can be about not only speculating new technological products and types of industry, or imagining a high-tech world, focusing on the logistical use of such technological aspects, leaving other aspects of the story in the second plan, but also the social consequences of said advances, how these advances or setbacks affect people’s day-to-day lives, and what are the preferable scenarios and not-so-desirable scenarios shaped by it.
It’s only natural that we understand science fiction as this majorly tech-aesthetic type of story, and this happens mostly because it’s not an easy task to speculate things about humans, we’re very complex, given that, contrary to technology, human nature does not have an update in its settings or a new model with advances every other year. For those reasons, what ends up coming out in much more quantity, and consequently gaining much more traction, are stories that speculate technology, making us much more familiar with these types of stories and understanding them as the blueprint of science fiction (Russ, 2007, p. 206).
3. Worlds imagined by women: a brief outline
The discussion of what constitutes science fiction could not go too far without considering women’s contribution to the genre. So, what have women been telling us through these types of fiction? The historically called “literature of estrangement” (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 1994, p. 1) has, at the beginning of its existence as a genre, shown us approaches to structural problems mining women’s lives throughout the centuries. Women authors have, since the 17th century been using writing as a means to imagine worlds in which they would thrive, and how, if they as women, could live different lives, ones in which they have some sort of autonomy and emancipation.
Authors like Mary Griffith, the author of Three Hundred Years Hence, who was the first North American woman to write science fiction (first anonymously, and then later using her own name) imagined a world where women have property rights and access to college, and where cooking is done in community centers. All of that in 1836, which was the same year that academic institutions started opening their doors to white women, and about 26 years before white women had the right to own property in the US.
Of course, unfortunately, these privileges were not granted to black and native women, as they were still considered property at the time. The history of women’s emancipation ends up also being a history of racism, a problem that Griffith’s vision was too limited to tackle given the century, and the fact that she, as it happens, was part of the protected classes at the time (Purdy, 2018).
On a similar note, in 1880, Mary Bradley Lane, the author of Mizora imagined a world in which there was a country located at the North Pole whose entire population was constituted by women. Lane’s fiction was a utopia that emphasized the benefits of technological advances in fields such as food, about which she envisioned nutritional efficient “foods”, which consisted of a type of chemical alternative that would supply all the human body needed for nutritional value. As for the household chores, Lane made sure to professionalize all of them in her fiction, freeing women of the obligation of spending their time bound to housekeeping.
As exemplified, this and many other early stories set in the 17th and 18th centuries focused on creating worlds where women would have the same privileges and autonomy as men, be compensated for housework, raise children, and overall reach emancipation (Taylor, 2014). Some of the subjects the authors portrayed in their writings shifted when The Frankstein, by British author Mary Shelley was published.
Shelley’s work, which still remains as one of the most famous works of science fiction to date, set new standards and broadened the issues that were brought to the fiction realm. Shelley’s writing posed questions that could, and did, engage in many philosophical debates around ethics, the limits of human exploration, and posthumanism. Topics such as the consequences of technology and science during the Industrial Revolution were also part of the relevant topics brought up by Shelley in her second novel, The Last Man.
Fast forward to the 20th century, the subject of fiction written by women shifted, at this time, the authors also included themes such as reproductive rights, race, and climate change and challenged established notions around gender in their writing. On reproductive rights, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and Solution Three, written by Naomi Mitchinson and published in 1962 and 1975, respectively, are pieces that shed light on the problems and lack of autonomy women experienced regarding their own bodies. Mitchinson proposed that raising a child should be compensated, as women were, and often still are, the primary caretaker of children, but such a task is not considered labor.
Along those lines, writer Ursula K. Le Guin challenges gender roles by extinguishing them in her fiction works. This is particularly discussed in her novel, The Dispossessed, where responsibility in society is shared equally by men and women, there is no such thing as gender roles, which applies to both genders. Pregnancy still is beared by women, but motherhood is a choice instead of an obligation (Nalivaike, 2018).
When it comes to including debates both around race and climate change in her fiction works, Octavia Butler has an extensive repertoire. Among her most famous works is The Parable of The Sower, the first book of Butler’s Earthseed series, one of the books that will be discussed in more detail later in the text, and Kindred. Butler’s writing, just like much of other 1970s writers challenged the utopian settings previously used in the early stories of estrangement. This approach critiqued an idealized view of the future, where problems such as different human oppressions, like racism, were not discussed in many early utopias. In light of that, the writers used elements of difference to impulsion their writing and shed light on problems instead of avoiding them (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 1992).
4. Unraveling Hopepunk
The term “hopepunk” is a term coined by the writer Alexandra Rowland, which gained some traction among fiction readers through a post the author made on their Tumblr account in 2017. In a general description, Rowland presents Hopepunk as a subgenre of science fiction, also explored in the fantasy genre, which argues 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” (Rowland, 2017).
According to a Vox magazine article published in 2018, by Aja Romano, the idea gained even more acknowledgment in 2018, when a panel on hopepunk fiction was included at a Nebula conference, preceding the actual Nebula Literature Awards. Later that year, writer N.K. Jemisin won a Hugo Awards threepeat for her trilogy Broken Earth, which conveyed themes of resistance and other elements of hopepunk style.
In their original Tumblr post, Rowland points out that an essential element of the entire idea is to understand that hopepunk is the counterpoint to grimdark. Grimdark is another subgenre of science fiction that mostly proposes nihilist worlds and focuses on the idea that humans are inherently bad, and deemed to do harm. Rowland proposes that hopepunk would be looking at the glass half full, using feelings like rage and dissatisfaction as fuel for doing something good despite the bad happening.
The author points out that the focus on hope and doing good should not be seen as a relation to noble right, a third subgenre, where characters fight for what is good and moral, and usually, there is only one big fight, and whatever is disturbing the good is then ended, and utopia arises. In an interview for the British entertainment website, Den of Geek, Rowland explains that
The instinct is to make it only about softness and kindness because those are what we’re most hungry for. We all want to be treated gently. But sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone is to stand up to a bully on their behalf, and that takes guts and rage. (Rowland, 2019)
They propose something different, arguing that hopepunk stories are based on knowing that there will always be a fight to fight, that because of the major structure of things, like patriarchy and capitalism, things like minorities' rights will always be at risk, and that instead of falling into a nihilist position, characters will have this stubborn attitude, which she deems as the punk part of it, which is to always keep fighting, and move through the world like radical change is possible.
In the same interview, Rowland finishes by saying that “You can do a lot when you decide to be a stubborn motherf****r who refuses to die” (Rowland, 2017), a sentence that speaks with elements of resilience, taking action in the face of despair, all of which are brought up in texts that will be discussed in the next section of this analysis.
There is a bigger debate about whether hopepunk should be recognized as a subgenre due to its lack of definition of itself via “clear, consistent, shared formal qualities” (Mancuso, 2021, p. 18) that would normally establish a genre/subgenre. For the purpose of this paper, hopepunk will be used as its isolated elements, understanding that they can be found in a variety of science fiction stories, including ones that were written before the term was coined.
5. The Stories
For further exploration of the elements of hopepunk, three stories written by women authors were selected to be briefly discussed and give examples of problems to be overcome, and raise questions that shed light on how to untangle them in the hopes of achieving livable worlds. The first book of the selection, called Severance, was written by Ling ma, and published in 2018, and it was set in New York, in 2011. It tells us the story of Candance Chen, a first-generation Asian American young woman, and unfulfilled Bible product coordinator, before and after an incurable infection slowly obliterates global civilization, which leads to the ending of the normalcy and monotonous existence the character had known.
Severance feels particularly eerie as its story is set during a pandemic. It pictures the day-to-day life under capitalism, and how dull everything tends to feel, it has endless details about the protagonist's skincare routine, and what brands are part of her life. It is a story not only about a pandemic, but also about immigration, and trying to find a home in an economy where everything is a commodity.
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes.To give a dollar to its homeless. (Ma, 2018, p. 242)
Ling Ma's writing shows how the structures of cities created for consumption create a volatile feeling of belonging, and consequently home. It narrates a dull capitalist world that happens to end just as apathetically and absurdly as its structures allow it. It is a tale of how things just happen and people are desensitized by it, because there are bills to pay, and employees can’t afford to stop showing up, even when there are unprecedented things happening. It is a story of how “The End begins before you are even aware of it. It passes as ordinary” (Ma, 2018, p. 8).
In Severance, Ma includes that “The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted.” (Ma, 2018, p. 180), and in this sense, it pictures some of what we as a world already went through with the 2020 pandemic. It poses questions like the reliability of news sources, and what should we hold on to, in such a crumbly world, where even such a subjective thing as the feeling of home and belonging seems to be a commodity. The big question of the book seems to be on who should we rely on in times when institutions supposed to address the situation, fail us.
While Severance portrays a setting of despair, and no apparent solution, the second selected book, the novel The Parable of The Sower, written by Octavia Butler is set in 2024 and follows Lauren Olamina, a young black woman who is migrating from her Southern California gated neighborhood to Northern California to escape climate change and societal collapse due to extreme poverty. It narrates her journey meeting other people in the same situation, and the making of her own religion.
And if Severance narrates the story of a world that has to end, Parable of the Sower narrates a similar world but in flames, quite literally. Lauren, the protagonist has a hopepunk attitude, as Rowland would describe it, from the very start, and that is because the character is trying to understand her spiritual beliefs at the same time as she is moving through this dystopian world. The character is very aware of the cause of the problems she and her peers are facing, as she describes:
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. (Butler, 1998, p. 6).
Lauren is trying to use this deeper religious understanding as fuel to keep moving, keep fighting, and building community. She ends up understanding God as this imperative element of constant change, and she seems very ok with the need to adapt, and how the need to adapt can also mean you get to shape God, as she poses in this part where she says that “The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves” (Butler, 2019, p. 176).
Octavia Butler was the first black woman to get recognition in the science fiction genre. This book was published in 1993, but like many things written by Octavia, it feels contemporary and predictive. The reason for that sensation of it being predictive should be granted to Octavia’s own efforts to accuracy. The author was known to spend a lot of time researching for her books as she, like Joanna Russ, had great respect for accuracy when it comes to the scientific part of her writings, as she famously said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2000. Overall, The Parable of The Sower proposes that a world is ending, but something can be born from it. It also proposes community living as a form of guaranteeing that everybody works, and everybody gets to enjoy the fruits of their work, in a safe setting.
The third and last book selected, To be Taught if Fortunate, by Becky Chambers, published in 2019 is set, as Chambers herself describes, in a near-ish future astronaut fiction and it tells us about a crew of astronauts on an ecological survey of an exoplanet system fourteen light-years from Earth. It begins more or less in a century from the 2020s, during a time in which space exploration is citizen-funded and astronauts make use of genetically engineered technology to survive life on other worlds (Chambers 2019).
This story speaks with the element of understanding collective efforts to solve structural problems, and although it does not give many answers, it poses questions that can help us get there. It speaks to current issues of effort and global focus on space exploration, while the problems on planet earth itself get no attention. An example of it is the following passage:
It's understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you're stuck on — the most vital criteria of home and health and safety — remain unanswered? (Chambers, 2019, p. 18)
Following Russ and Butler’s praise for precision, the story is accurate in its scientific usage, and it also makes use of technologies that are being developed at the moment. It imagines how such technology can be used in a non-invasive way when it comes to both human bodies and the planets that humans plan to visit. As the protagonist, Ariadne points that “I'm an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.” (Chambers, 2019, p. 19), and in doing so, it creates a scenario that argues for some key points that are essential to shaping a livable and desirable future.
Chamber seems to focus on shaping curiosity on a collective level, in her story, the author proposes exploration as opposed to a product for rich men or private companies, but as property of people. As a thing, that benefits humanity as a whole and can’t be sold, because it is essentially public, as the author mentions:
If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands] if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen (Chambers, 2019, p. 20 ).
6. Conclusions:
As Donawerth and Kolmerten suggest, science fiction written by women not only challenges the systemic binary oppositions which are a set of elements widely present in works of literature of the kind written by men, these works also reassess “generic forms to generate means other than opposition or conflict to structure a story” (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 2011, p. 14). This is not to say that science fiction written by men hasn’t elucidated or even denunciated systemic problems through their writing, which they extensively did, given how much we go back to certain pieces of literature as a reference for the debates surrounding these problems. This is to say, that even in those recognized efforts, the stories depicted women in such a way, that women, as a class, did not see themselves, at least not how they wanted or how they experienced things. This naturally leads to the desire of writing oneself’s world.
The worlds women chose to shape through their writing have evolved along with their emancipation. If in the 17th and 18th centuries authors depicted worlds where house tasks were done by robots, so they could pursue education, these themes changed along with the rights women have conquered. Now that some of these demands have been met, women want a world in which they thrive, and to thrive, first, women have to have an actual world. This is why women have been, once again, through fiction, alerting us of the danger of not having a world anymore, which is where the element of hope comes in handy and can offer readers ideas on how to organize for shaping a world worth living in.
Firstly, Severance paints the world that needs to end so that it doesn’t cause our end first. The idea that our current economic system does harm to a significant sphere of our lives is not new in fiction by any means, but its roots are so settled that readers have to be reminded about it from time to time. Parable of the Sower points towards the mitigation, the fighting, the punk if you will, such as the inevitable migration to colder places, it also advocates for resilience, as we have to move through a fast-changing world and the building of communities that focus on collective work and mutual care. To be Taught, If Fortunate, provides us with a scenario where science is made by and for the people. It imagines collective and open-source knowledge. It poses questions about the nature of exploration, and it offers us curiosity without colonization.
In conclusion, all these books portray the need to adapt, and also not the end of the world, but the end of a world. They suggest that when institutions fail us, we have no other option but to adapt and build a whole new world from the ground up. They are based on research about the most awful things happening, or about to happen, and still dare the reader to imagine scenarios where there are things to be stubbornly hopeful for, and build a life after it. Hope isn't about knowing exactly how the future will take shape; it's about how you build it. (Chambers, 2019).
References
Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid's Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Butler, O. E. (2019). Parable of the sower. London: Headline Book Publishing
___. (2018). Kindred. London: Headline Book Publishing.
___. (1998) Parable of the talents: a novel. New York :Seven Stories Press
___. (2000). Interview with Charlie Rose [video online]. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pu-Miq4tk&t=182s&ab_channel=sonic1267
Chambers, B. (2019). To be Taught if Fortunate. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Donawerth, J., Kolmerten, C. (1994). Introduction. In Donawerth. J. (Ed.), Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of difference (pp. 1−15). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Griffith, M. (1836). Three Hundred Years Hence. [online]. Retrieved from https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/griffith/hence/hence.html
Jemisin, N. K. (2016). Broken Earth Trilogy. London: Orbit.
Lane, M. B. (1999). Mizora. Winnipeg: Bison Books.
Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed: An ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper & Row.
Ma, L. (2018). Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Mancuso, C. (2021). The Two Speculations: The Poetics of Contemporary Speculative Fiction. Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge.
Mitchinson, N. (1962). Memoirs of a Spacewoman. New York: Berkley.
___. (1975) Solution Three. London: Dobson.
Nalivaike, A. (2018). The Politics of Gender in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture, 5(1), 16–24.
doi: 10.19044/llc.v5no1a2
Purdy, L. (2018). Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence: Utopia, Women, and Marriage. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 77(5), 1209–1242.
doi: 10.1111/ajes.12245
Romano, A. (2018). Hopepunk, the latest storytelling trend, is all about weaponized optimism. [online]. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/27/18137571/what-is-hopepunk-noblebright-grimdark
Rowland, A. (2017). The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. [online]. Retrieved from: https://ariaste.tumblr.com/post/163500138919/ariaste-the-opposite-of-grimdark-is-hopepunk
___. (2019). A Hopepunk Guide: Interview with Alexandra Rowland. [online]. Retrieved from: https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/a-hopepunk-guide-interview-with-alexandra-rowland/
Russ, J. (2007). The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Shelley, M. (2012). Frankenstein. London: Penguin Classics.
___. (1999). The Last Man. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
Taylor, T. (2022). Remembering the future, redefining the past: a study of nineteenth-century British feminist utopias. University of Iowa, Iowa City.
The ultimate intention of this paper is to explore science fiction written by women and how, through history, women have been using science fiction to think about subjective ways to empower change. In the first half of this work, the definition of what has been popularly understood as science fiction, and some counterpoints to its nomenclature will be discussed.
Along with that, a brief description of aspects of what science fiction written by women has been telling us in terms of world-building, and a description of what were some of the demands of women authors from the 17th to 20th century, will be presented, with the goal of laying a base to contextualize the reader of such themes.
Moving forward in the text, there will be an introduction to the concept of hopepunk and what are some of its elements. This will lead to the presentation of works by Octavia E. Butler, Becky Chambers, and Ling Ma, which will be explored along with the hopepunk elements of said stories. Finally, I will conclude the paper by presenting how such works denunciate and try to offer subjective alternatives as a way of beginning to tackle current global problems such as climate change and social inequality.
2. Delineating science fiction
In a broad sense, the science fiction genre can be defined as stories written with the goal of wonder -- not without the restriction of the realm of reality as the fantasy genre stories, some authors will argue -- but in the sense of imagining about different scenarios, conjunctures, and worlds that could have been a reality, or can still take shape.
These stories typically imagine the potential consequences powered by new scientific advances, technologies, policies, and legislation on various aspects of human life. The range of scenarios and topics have created a vast number of subgenres of science fiction, ones which have become more widely known, through popular culture, than others, such as Space Operas or Solarpunk.
For writer and scholar Joanna Russ, science fiction can be described as What If literature, as she proposes, there are two essential elements in the definition of science fiction, which are The What If and The Serious Explanation (Russ, 2007). Russ also says that science fiction presents aspects of life not as they normally are, but instead, as they can potentially be. She explains that once the author presents the scenario of what might be, they have to provide a reasonable explanation that cannot go against widely known aspects of scientific knowledge -- such as gravity, time and space, the existence of the sun, or that the earth is round.
In this sense, science fiction is speculative fiction, once it reads the world it is located in and proposes scenarios that might have not been considered previously. The idea of science fiction as speculative fiction is not new by any chance, and in fact, a lot of writers in the field prefer that their writing be referred to as speculative fiction instead of science fiction. One example of said writers is Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
The preference for the term “speculative” instead of “science” when referring to this type of fiction can take place for a variety of reasons. One of them, explained by Margaret Atwood herself is that she wants her stories to be differentiated from squids in space as the author explained in an interview that she gave for the British Television channel BBC in 2012.
This apparent need to differentiate the author's work from space operas, the subgenre of science fiction that explores space travels and encounters with otherworldly species, seems to come from a place of wanting to express that Atwood’s work is focused on scenarios that take place on the social fabric of planet earth, as her books on religious dystopias, such as The Handmaid's Tale extensively suggest. The impression that social aspects presented in speculative/science fiction are an uncommon thing, or even an aspect that would differentiate speculative from science fiction and other literary genres is a known one.
This brings us to the fact that science fiction does not exclusively stream from STEM, it also streams from the social sciences and humanity field. It can be about not only speculating new technological products and types of industry, or imagining a high-tech world, focusing on the logistical use of such technological aspects, leaving other aspects of the story in the second plan, but also the social consequences of said advances, how these advances or setbacks affect people’s day-to-day lives, and what are the preferable scenarios and not-so-desirable scenarios shaped by it.
It’s only natural that we understand science fiction as this majorly tech-aesthetic type of story, and this happens mostly because it’s not an easy task to speculate things about humans, we’re very complex, given that, contrary to technology, human nature does not have an update in its settings or a new model with advances every other year. For those reasons, what ends up coming out in much more quantity, and consequently gaining much more traction, are stories that speculate technology, making us much more familiar with these types of stories and understanding them as the blueprint of science fiction (Russ, 2007, p. 206).
3. Worlds imagined by women: a brief outline
The discussion of what constitutes science fiction could not go too far without considering women’s contribution to the genre. So, what have women been telling us through these types of fiction? The historically called “literature of estrangement” (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 1994, p. 1) has, at the beginning of its existence as a genre, shown us approaches to structural problems mining women’s lives throughout the centuries. Women authors have, since the 17th century been using writing as a means to imagine worlds in which they would thrive, and how, if they as women, could live different lives, ones in which they have some sort of autonomy and emancipation.
Authors like Mary Griffith, the author of Three Hundred Years Hence, who was the first North American woman to write science fiction (first anonymously, and then later using her own name) imagined a world where women have property rights and access to college, and where cooking is done in community centers. All of that in 1836, which was the same year that academic institutions started opening their doors to white women, and about 26 years before white women had the right to own property in the US.
Of course, unfortunately, these privileges were not granted to black and native women, as they were still considered property at the time. The history of women’s emancipation ends up also being a history of racism, a problem that Griffith’s vision was too limited to tackle given the century, and the fact that she, as it happens, was part of the protected classes at the time (Purdy, 2018).
On a similar note, in 1880, Mary Bradley Lane, the author of Mizora imagined a world in which there was a country located at the North Pole whose entire population was constituted by women. Lane’s fiction was a utopia that emphasized the benefits of technological advances in fields such as food, about which she envisioned nutritional efficient “foods”, which consisted of a type of chemical alternative that would supply all the human body needed for nutritional value. As for the household chores, Lane made sure to professionalize all of them in her fiction, freeing women of the obligation of spending their time bound to housekeeping.
As exemplified, this and many other early stories set in the 17th and 18th centuries focused on creating worlds where women would have the same privileges and autonomy as men, be compensated for housework, raise children, and overall reach emancipation (Taylor, 2014). Some of the subjects the authors portrayed in their writings shifted when The Frankstein, by British author Mary Shelley was published.
Shelley’s work, which still remains as one of the most famous works of science fiction to date, set new standards and broadened the issues that were brought to the fiction realm. Shelley’s writing posed questions that could, and did, engage in many philosophical debates around ethics, the limits of human exploration, and posthumanism. Topics such as the consequences of technology and science during the Industrial Revolution were also part of the relevant topics brought up by Shelley in her second novel, The Last Man.
Fast forward to the 20th century, the subject of fiction written by women shifted, at this time, the authors also included themes such as reproductive rights, race, and climate change and challenged established notions around gender in their writing. On reproductive rights, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and Solution Three, written by Naomi Mitchinson and published in 1962 and 1975, respectively, are pieces that shed light on the problems and lack of autonomy women experienced regarding their own bodies. Mitchinson proposed that raising a child should be compensated, as women were, and often still are, the primary caretaker of children, but such a task is not considered labor.
Along those lines, writer Ursula K. Le Guin challenges gender roles by extinguishing them in her fiction works. This is particularly discussed in her novel, The Dispossessed, where responsibility in society is shared equally by men and women, there is no such thing as gender roles, which applies to both genders. Pregnancy still is beared by women, but motherhood is a choice instead of an obligation (Nalivaike, 2018).
When it comes to including debates both around race and climate change in her fiction works, Octavia Butler has an extensive repertoire. Among her most famous works is The Parable of The Sower, the first book of Butler’s Earthseed series, one of the books that will be discussed in more detail later in the text, and Kindred. Butler’s writing, just like much of other 1970s writers challenged the utopian settings previously used in the early stories of estrangement. This approach critiqued an idealized view of the future, where problems such as different human oppressions, like racism, were not discussed in many early utopias. In light of that, the writers used elements of difference to impulsion their writing and shed light on problems instead of avoiding them (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 1992).
4. Unraveling Hopepunk
The term “hopepunk” is a term coined by the writer Alexandra Rowland, which gained some traction among fiction readers through a post the author made on their Tumblr account in 2017. In a general description, Rowland presents Hopepunk as a subgenre of science fiction, also explored in the fantasy genre, which argues 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” (Rowland, 2017).
According to a Vox magazine article published in 2018, by Aja Romano, the idea gained even more acknowledgment in 2018, when a panel on hopepunk fiction was included at a Nebula conference, preceding the actual Nebula Literature Awards. Later that year, writer N.K. Jemisin won a Hugo Awards threepeat for her trilogy Broken Earth, which conveyed themes of resistance and other elements of hopepunk style.
In their original Tumblr post, Rowland points out that an essential element of the entire idea is to understand that hopepunk is the counterpoint to grimdark. Grimdark is another subgenre of science fiction that mostly proposes nihilist worlds and focuses on the idea that humans are inherently bad, and deemed to do harm. Rowland proposes that hopepunk would be looking at the glass half full, using feelings like rage and dissatisfaction as fuel for doing something good despite the bad happening.
The author points out that the focus on hope and doing good should not be seen as a relation to noble right, a third subgenre, where characters fight for what is good and moral, and usually, there is only one big fight, and whatever is disturbing the good is then ended, and utopia arises. In an interview for the British entertainment website, Den of Geek, Rowland explains that
The instinct is to make it only about softness and kindness because those are what we’re most hungry for. We all want to be treated gently. But sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone is to stand up to a bully on their behalf, and that takes guts and rage. (Rowland, 2019)
They propose something different, arguing that hopepunk stories are based on knowing that there will always be a fight to fight, that because of the major structure of things, like patriarchy and capitalism, things like minorities' rights will always be at risk, and that instead of falling into a nihilist position, characters will have this stubborn attitude, which she deems as the punk part of it, which is to always keep fighting, and move through the world like radical change is possible.
In the same interview, Rowland finishes by saying that “You can do a lot when you decide to be a stubborn motherf****r who refuses to die” (Rowland, 2017), a sentence that speaks with elements of resilience, taking action in the face of despair, all of which are brought up in texts that will be discussed in the next section of this analysis.
There is a bigger debate about whether hopepunk should be recognized as a subgenre due to its lack of definition of itself via “clear, consistent, shared formal qualities” (Mancuso, 2021, p. 18) that would normally establish a genre/subgenre. For the purpose of this paper, hopepunk will be used as its isolated elements, understanding that they can be found in a variety of science fiction stories, including ones that were written before the term was coined.
5. The Stories
For further exploration of the elements of hopepunk, three stories written by women authors were selected to be briefly discussed and give examples of problems to be overcome, and raise questions that shed light on how to untangle them in the hopes of achieving livable worlds. The first book of the selection, called Severance, was written by Ling ma, and published in 2018, and it was set in New York, in 2011. It tells us the story of Candance Chen, a first-generation Asian American young woman, and unfulfilled Bible product coordinator, before and after an incurable infection slowly obliterates global civilization, which leads to the ending of the normalcy and monotonous existence the character had known.
Severance feels particularly eerie as its story is set during a pandemic. It pictures the day-to-day life under capitalism, and how dull everything tends to feel, it has endless details about the protagonist's skincare routine, and what brands are part of her life. It is a story not only about a pandemic, but also about immigration, and trying to find a home in an economy where everything is a commodity.
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes.To give a dollar to its homeless. (Ma, 2018, p. 242)
Ling Ma's writing shows how the structures of cities created for consumption create a volatile feeling of belonging, and consequently home. It narrates a dull capitalist world that happens to end just as apathetically and absurdly as its structures allow it. It is a tale of how things just happen and people are desensitized by it, because there are bills to pay, and employees can’t afford to stop showing up, even when there are unprecedented things happening. It is a story of how “The End begins before you are even aware of it. It passes as ordinary” (Ma, 2018, p. 8).
In Severance, Ma includes that “The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted.” (Ma, 2018, p. 180), and in this sense, it pictures some of what we as a world already went through with the 2020 pandemic. It poses questions like the reliability of news sources, and what should we hold on to, in such a crumbly world, where even such a subjective thing as the feeling of home and belonging seems to be a commodity. The big question of the book seems to be on who should we rely on in times when institutions supposed to address the situation, fail us.
While Severance portrays a setting of despair, and no apparent solution, the second selected book, the novel The Parable of The Sower, written by Octavia Butler is set in 2024 and follows Lauren Olamina, a young black woman who is migrating from her Southern California gated neighborhood to Northern California to escape climate change and societal collapse due to extreme poverty. It narrates her journey meeting other people in the same situation, and the making of her own religion.
And if Severance narrates the story of a world that has to end, Parable of the Sower narrates a similar world but in flames, quite literally. Lauren, the protagonist has a hopepunk attitude, as Rowland would describe it, from the very start, and that is because the character is trying to understand her spiritual beliefs at the same time as she is moving through this dystopian world. The character is very aware of the cause of the problems she and her peers are facing, as she describes:
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. (Butler, 1998, p. 6).
Lauren is trying to use this deeper religious understanding as fuel to keep moving, keep fighting, and building community. She ends up understanding God as this imperative element of constant change, and she seems very ok with the need to adapt, and how the need to adapt can also mean you get to shape God, as she poses in this part where she says that “The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves” (Butler, 2019, p. 176).
Octavia Butler was the first black woman to get recognition in the science fiction genre. This book was published in 1993, but like many things written by Octavia, it feels contemporary and predictive. The reason for that sensation of it being predictive should be granted to Octavia’s own efforts to accuracy. The author was known to spend a lot of time researching for her books as she, like Joanna Russ, had great respect for accuracy when it comes to the scientific part of her writings, as she famously said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2000. Overall, The Parable of The Sower proposes that a world is ending, but something can be born from it. It also proposes community living as a form of guaranteeing that everybody works, and everybody gets to enjoy the fruits of their work, in a safe setting.
The third and last book selected, To be Taught if Fortunate, by Becky Chambers, published in 2019 is set, as Chambers herself describes, in a near-ish future astronaut fiction and it tells us about a crew of astronauts on an ecological survey of an exoplanet system fourteen light-years from Earth. It begins more or less in a century from the 2020s, during a time in which space exploration is citizen-funded and astronauts make use of genetically engineered technology to survive life on other worlds (Chambers 2019).
This story speaks with the element of understanding collective efforts to solve structural problems, and although it does not give many answers, it poses questions that can help us get there. It speaks to current issues of effort and global focus on space exploration, while the problems on planet earth itself get no attention. An example of it is the following passage:
It's understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you're stuck on — the most vital criteria of home and health and safety — remain unanswered? (Chambers, 2019, p. 18)
Following Russ and Butler’s praise for precision, the story is accurate in its scientific usage, and it also makes use of technologies that are being developed at the moment. It imagines how such technology can be used in a non-invasive way when it comes to both human bodies and the planets that humans plan to visit. As the protagonist, Ariadne points that “I'm an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.” (Chambers, 2019, p. 19), and in doing so, it creates a scenario that argues for some key points that are essential to shaping a livable and desirable future.
Chamber seems to focus on shaping curiosity on a collective level, in her story, the author proposes exploration as opposed to a product for rich men or private companies, but as property of people. As a thing, that benefits humanity as a whole and can’t be sold, because it is essentially public, as the author mentions:
If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands] if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen (Chambers, 2019, p. 20 ).
6. Conclusions:
As Donawerth and Kolmerten suggest, science fiction written by women not only challenges the systemic binary oppositions which are a set of elements widely present in works of literature of the kind written by men, these works also reassess “generic forms to generate means other than opposition or conflict to structure a story” (Donawerth & Kolmerten, 2011, p. 14). This is not to say that science fiction written by men hasn’t elucidated or even denunciated systemic problems through their writing, which they extensively did, given how much we go back to certain pieces of literature as a reference for the debates surrounding these problems. This is to say, that even in those recognized efforts, the stories depicted women in such a way, that women, as a class, did not see themselves, at least not how they wanted or how they experienced things. This naturally leads to the desire of writing oneself’s world.
The worlds women chose to shape through their writing have evolved along with their emancipation. If in the 17th and 18th centuries authors depicted worlds where house tasks were done by robots, so they could pursue education, these themes changed along with the rights women have conquered. Now that some of these demands have been met, women want a world in which they thrive, and to thrive, first, women have to have an actual world. This is why women have been, once again, through fiction, alerting us of the danger of not having a world anymore, which is where the element of hope comes in handy and can offer readers ideas on how to organize for shaping a world worth living in.
Firstly, Severance paints the world that needs to end so that it doesn’t cause our end first. The idea that our current economic system does harm to a significant sphere of our lives is not new in fiction by any means, but its roots are so settled that readers have to be reminded about it from time to time. Parable of the Sower points towards the mitigation, the fighting, the punk if you will, such as the inevitable migration to colder places, it also advocates for resilience, as we have to move through a fast-changing world and the building of communities that focus on collective work and mutual care. To be Taught, If Fortunate, provides us with a scenario where science is made by and for the people. It imagines collective and open-source knowledge. It poses questions about the nature of exploration, and it offers us curiosity without colonization.
In conclusion, all these books portray the need to adapt, and also not the end of the world, but the end of a world. They suggest that when institutions fail us, we have no other option but to adapt and build a whole new world from the ground up. They are based on research about the most awful things happening, or about to happen, and still dare the reader to imagine scenarios where there are things to be stubbornly hopeful for, and build a life after it. Hope isn't about knowing exactly how the future will take shape; it's about how you build it. (Chambers, 2019).
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Originally presented as a talk at KISMIF, published by KISMIF, at 2022.