That said, “-punk” subgenres aren’t inherently progressive narratives about people fighting oppressive power structures; I think they’re most interesting and use the setting to its most power when they ARE, but like, the original cyberpunks of the 80s were writing about techno-losers who are just kind of surviving and also sometimes doing crimes in the oppressively corporate-controlled future; they sure weren’t fighting it. “-punk” meant counterculture lowlifes, but didn’t necessarily imply anything about opposing oppression—William Gibson’s OG cyberpunk was frequently about people living within it, suffering under it, succumbing to it, or enacting lateral violence to survive it. Cyberpunk has ALWAYS been equally, if not more, about the aesthetic than the politics.
Personally I’m fine with “-punk” subgenres indicating setting/technology aesthetic and relationship to that setting/technology, rather than a specific political positioning or call to action. But I do think that to be even remotely INTERESTING about it it needs to be engaging with questions of the way technology interacts with politics and power structures. Which solarpunk at least has!— an aesthetic, a technology base, and a political philosophy baked in. Cyberpunk at least says “unchecked corporate power/technocracy bad”; steampunk says “imperialism/colonialism and classism bad”; solarpunk says “eco-conscious tech and socialism good.”
(Hopepunk has no aesthetic and says nothing in particular.)
