La science fiction française depuis 1970. La science fiction en Asie de l’Est - ReS Futurae. Imaginaire informatique et science fiction - ReS Futurae. Théorie(s) de la science fiction - ReS Futurae. Ce que signifie étudier la science fiction aujourd'hui - ReS Futurae. Hopepunk : one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy, and the empire of unsheathed knives. They have built an empire of liesWhere the dead beneath are buried twiceTo better feed the living aboveAnd you can keep the teeth of hunger off your own neckOnly if you tell the ravening lies yourselfAnd they too want to live…Let us build togetherThe empire of unsheathed knives and hungersWhere we will not lie in small rooms and say we want poetryWhen all we want is to liveLet us pave the streets in corpsesThey are paved so already, and we cannot raise the deadBut let us leave them out next timeLet us bury lies instead of the livingWhose mouths we stop up with storiesLet us build it soon, if not today “Victory Condition” by Astolat In July of 2017, I coined the word “hopepunk,” initially defined very simply in a Tumblr post: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk.
Pass it on.” When asked to clarify, I wrote: “The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. I don’t know if I can. But alright. Ada Palmer and the weird hand of progress. What is Solarpunk ? From the perspective of the early 21st century, things look pretty grim. A deadly cocktail of crises engulf the people of planet Earth and all other forms of biotic life which share it: a geopolitical crisis, an economic crisis, and a worsening ecological crisis due to global warming, which stems from a political-economic system that requires fossil fuels to power its technostructure. Culture, having as it does a symbiotic relationship with material conditions, reflects a lot of these crises in fiction and the arts. The 2000s and 2010s were replete with apocalyptic imagery of a future ravaged by war, totalitarianism, runaway weapons technology, killer viruses, zombies, and environmental collapse.
Not that such narratives are unneeded. At best, they can serve as a wake-up call for those caught up in the myth that we had reached the “end of history” with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism on a planetary scale. Solarpunk is a Revolt of Hope Against Despair Like this: Solarpunk, or how to be an optimistic radical. Punks (of the 70s and 80s kind) were not known for their optimism. Quite the opposite in fact. Raging against the establishment in various ways, there was “no future” because, according to the Sex Pistols, punks are “the poison / In your human machine / We’re the future / Your future”. To be punk, was, by definition, to resist the future. In contrast, the most basic definition of solarpunk — offered by musician and photographer Jay Springett — is that it is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?’
At first pass, then, Solarpunk seems to turn the central tenet of punk on its head. How, then, are the bright futures imagined by solarpunks, worthy of the “punk” suffix? Solarpunk’s optimism towards the future is the first concept that needs complicating here. Apocalypse or utopia? In a fictional sense, solarpunk sits across the table from “cli-fi”.