So a few days ago Slate published an article in what has become a distressingly common subgenre we could call “People are writing SF wrong! Here’s what we must do to fix it!” It seems to have been inspired by an earlier article in Vox about “Hopepunk,” a nascent literary movement whose name was coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017. In fact, the original clickbaity title seems to have been “Hopepunk can’t fix our broken science fiction.” The current title is, “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why can’t we move past cyberpunk?”
For anyone who was around when William Gibson published Neuromancer, the article is somewhat amusing. There is a central failure of reasoning that permeates the entire article, and it is this: the assumption that every genre that has been granted the suffix -punk has evolved from, and is thematically connected to, cyberpunk. The author’s entire thesis is based on this assumption, without which the premise of the article collapses.
Maybe we can call this the homeopathic theory of literary movements.
Hell, steampunk is only called “steampunk” because Gibson and Sterling wrote a Victorian cyberpunk novel called The Difference Engine. That’s the sole point of contact. Atompunk and dieselpunk are even further removed, being only named by analogy with steampunk. Hopepunk itself has more to do with reaction against cynical dystopias and grimdark fantasy than anything to do with cyberpunk as a literary movement.
Literally, most -punk offshoots have as much to do with cyberpunk as Gamergate has to do with breaking into hotels for political espinoge.
