Coming this fall: grimpunk

[sholio]

A discussion at rachelmanija's blog on hopepunk and how to define it has made me realize that you can take all the components of the various fuzzy-edged new genre descriptors mentioned there and in the comments (grimdark, valorbright/noblebright, solarpunk, etc) and combine them to produce new genre descriptors that are actually surprisingly useful.

Hopedark, for example! Useful for canons like Handmaid's Tale or V for Vendetta, where it's certainly dark, but not precisely hopeless.

Grimbright! Rachel suggests this would be like the decadent luxury worlds of SF. I think it could also be used for those Stepford Wives/Get Out types of canons, where everything is bright and beautiful and shiny and awful in a 1950s-suburbia kind of way, and it's all fun and games and neighborhood potlucks until you find out a little too much about the robots/aliens/cultists/pod people next door.

Solargrim! (The world has been taken over by plants and EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.)

What about Valorpunk/Noblepunk? I think this should be a thing; I mean, to the extent that any of this should be a thing. In fact, I kind of have ideas for it.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Tell me your ideas for noblepunk!

[sholio]

Well, my brain started with "Arthurian Leverage AU" (which I guess is just Robin Hood) and then migrated more generally to fantasy with typical epic fantasy plotting and Good Always Triumphs morality, but a punk aesthetic/political edge, i.e. where it's not about restoring the rightful king to the throne but setting up a constitutional republic instead, or unionizing the tunnel orcs or whatever. Only less polemic and terrible than it sounds when I try to describe it.

[rachelmanija]

Like Terry Pratchett only with less parody and more epic.

[sholio]

Yes! Actually, Terry Pratchett is a great example of the kind of thing I was thinking of.

[sovay]

ut a punk aesthetic/political edge, i.e. where it's not about restoring the rightful king to the throne but setting up a constitutional republic instead

Okay, so if you haven't read Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy, here is where I recommend you Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy.

[stultiloquentia]

Yes!!

[conuly]

I would read the hell out of that, and you're allowed to be a little polemic.

Also wanted: FFS, more than one obvious religion that everybody believes in, whether or not actual, physical gods pop along every so often to be all "Yup, I'm really literally real, and everybody knows who the true gods are except those evil worshipers of the evil god over there, here's a plot coupon and maybe a trinket!"

[scioscribe]

I would totally read fantasy world union organization. Someone needs to advocate for all those ubiquitous brothel districts, for one thing.

Honestly, I would also read a whole novel of high fantasy punk bards who challenge notions of aesthetics (more screaming than some people think is necessary) and society (ditching wealthy patrons, singing very politically-charged songs that ge them in trouble).

[muccamukk]

That sounds like Westmark.

[willibald]

I've been waiting to see a new genre of stories set in mid/late '70s Britain. It would be called Punkpunk!

[sholio]

Okay, that is really funny.

[kore]

//hands you a lovely bouquet of internets

[rachelmanija]

Brightdark has the trappings of fluffiness, but is super depressing. Like the books about the veterinarian who treats unicorns in fantasyland... and then suddenly Alzheimer's disease, werewolf puppy euthanasia, torture, and genocide.

[sholio]

HAHAHA. Yes. Or that MG book I read not too long ago that promises the lonely foster kid gets a cute new found family, and it does that right up into everything implodes in the last two chapters when her birth family comes to get her and then her foster mother won't even talk to her on the phone because she wants her to bond with her birth family instead!

I think my favorite out of all of this might be solargrim. Someone needs to write about the kudzu dystopia.

[kore]

I thought the kudzu dystopia was Annihilation! lol

[conuly]

What the hell book was that? I want to make sure I never read it.

[indywind]

re: kuzu dystopia, would Sheri S. Tepper's Grass do?

[sebenikela]

ha, I wrote some hunger games fic that I described as "agrarian cyberpunk dystopia" but "solargrim" is much more concise

[scioscribe]

Kij Johnson's "Ponies" was the first thing I thought of for brightdark: https://www.tor.com/2010/11/17/ponies/

[kore]

Atwood's narrator really is very passive, though. Both adaptations (film and series) make her a lot more active than she ever is in the book. From what I remember Atwood wrote it as a partial critique of the Gen X feminists, because she thought we were too passive and unpolitical. The narrator's mother is a very typical seventies radical feminist, and she and her daughter clash repeatedly over that. To me one of the big things the book is about is what happens when good people do nothing, or just kind of determinedly keep their heads down.

[yhlee]

See, the place to which my brain goes when you say solargrim is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which has all sorts of great moments of quiet fridge horror that only emerge when you realize that no, actually, Severian is either deeply confused or lying all the time, to say nothing of the additional bits of fridge horror that emerge when you suss out the Latin. (I don't know enough Greek to have sussed out any Greek.)

[sovay]

See, the place to which my brain goes when you say solargrim is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which has all sorts of great moments of quiet fridge horror

I feel like a lot of far-future/dying Earth fiction could be solargrim, Gene Wolfe very much included.

[ratcreature]

See, when I read "solargrim" my mind doesn't go to plants right away but to those solarflare/magnetic field collapse apocalypse storylines. Though I guess once our civilization is gone the plants would take over soon enough.

[thawrecka]

I can just as easily imagine hopedark being a story full of hopeful conversations that happen in a badly lit goth club. Which I would read, tbqh.

[sholio]

Hopedark gothpunk! :D

[yhlee]

I would read the hell out of this too. Someone please write it!

[rachelmanija]

Bartending in the dark!

[yalumesse]

I love this!

[oracne]

It sounds like shipping! I totally ship NoblePunk.

[cornerofmadness]

Go for those ideas. By this definition something I'm working on is Grimbright

[redrikki]

I like this. It's always useful to have new terms to play with.

[stultiloquentia]

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the way your brain works?

I'm laughing at myself because I'm usually the one grumping about the constrictions of Hogwarts houses and refusing to sort myself, but Hogwarts namesmushes would actually be really fun and descriptive here, as lit genres.

Hufflepunk vs. Slytherpunk vs. Gryffinpunk vs. Ravenpunk? Totally lucid narrative aesthetics, eh?

Gryffindark? Hufflegrim? Ravenhope?