Navarro
Well-known member
Even more inane is "hopepunk" which means ... what exactly?
To Hell With Space Elves: Misanthropy in Science Fiction
- Thread starter Laskar
- Start date
Even more inane is "hopepunk" which means ... what exactly?
Logically,either hope of punks,or hope that punks would create better world.Question is,better then what ? becouse everybody could made better future then commies or leftists.Not mention green - they really would kill 90% of population if they could.
ShadowLord
Well-known member
Mind expounding on that? I'm not exactly knowledgeable with the whole Green Energy thing or Solarpunk beyond the tvtropes page. Feel free to PM me or we can start a new thread.
f1onagher
Well-known member
If we need to continue from here I say make a new thread, but its tangential to the space elf misanthropy stuff so I'll try to answer it here.
So I'm going to put the cart before the horse and talk about the punk part since its shorter and I'm less familiar with it. The punk genre revolves around rebellion. Whether its against the system or the Man or whatever is irrelevant, our heroes will be scrappy underdogs fighting enemies with greater systemic power. In cyberpunk you're fighting megacorps in a world where corporations have taken complete control of society, in diesalpunk you'll be fighting the emergent ideologies (usually fascism, but occasionally someone will remember that communism is bad too), in steampunk its supposed to the Victorian social system, and so on and so forth.
The important ingredient to this is that each type of punk is a mix and match package. In cyberpunk you'll also wrestle with what it means to be a person in a world with artificial intelligence, clones, mental downloads, and cybernetics. Or you'll debate the border between state and private power. Or maybe you'll have an analogue to humanity itself becoming obsolete. There are a lot of ancillary themes that can be explored. To give comparison Steampunk can wrestle with the cost of technological progress or the injustice of class systems. Dieselpunk frequently explores the radicalization of ideologues or how good intentions can transform into new tyrannies. The point being that all punk genres have a prepackaged suite of themes or tropes that can be swapped around or reused depending on the writer's preferences or beliefs.
And obviously there's the visual themes. All punks have quickly identifiable visual aesthetics that make them easy to identify, though this does cause other genres set in similar time periods to cast themselves as 'punk'. A Girl Genius type romp of adventure and danger is a pulp, not a punk story, even if both use dirigibles and lots of gears.
Where that translates into Solarpunk is that you are rebelling against the solar themes, which will require me to explain the Green thing.
I have an extensive background in environmentally friendly industries. I've manufactured water conserving fertilizer, sold bio remediacts to clean up oil spills, worked the technical side of environmentally friendly commercial cleaning chemicals, ion and ozone based air purification, and even fracking nanotech designed to make oil sites cleaner and more efficient. This means I've worked alongside geologists, windmill engineers, agriculturists, and so on in the most active and practical environmental industries currently working. The one thing all these people have in common is that they hate the Green movement with a burning passion.
In modern politics you will almost always find a functionally irrelevant Green party lurking in the background of every country and they always want one of two things. Barely disguised socialism or a competently asinine level of societal regression. You've probably heard of the Green new Deal that gets bandied about in Democratic circles. Its a functionally impossible attempt to forcibly alter the US' infrastructure to run off of only a select few 'clean' energy sources. The capacity and cost of these approved sources is never taken into account, secondary knock on effects are never accounted for, and the sustainability of this system once in place is never considered. And its honestly one of the saner proposals I've heard out of the Green movements which tend to value the environment over human good. The recent obsession with climate change is fundamentally just a justification to implement extreme measure for presumed good of all mankind. Notice how often left leaning politicians make off-handed remarks about looming climate catastrophe.
The penultimate Green ideal is a zero impact society, one where human activity has a negligible impact on the environment and the ecosystem remains clean and unaltered. This ignores a lot of realities about what climate change actually is, but the fundamental ideal is not in and of itself bad. Its the implementation and inferred implications that makes this heinous. Any society that prioritizes zero impact would have to be heavily regulated and controlled. If a few families wander off and start building log cabins and farms that has a huge impact on the environment. And if these outsiders want to engage in industry and commerce to improve their situation, well that drastically increase impact. So everyone must be controlled, their standards of living kept modest, their movements restricted to certain approved preserves, and their daily lives regulated to the hour. Enterprise and entrepreneurship would only increase impact and so would have to be curtailed. Even family sizes would need to be regulated as expanding family groups would require increasing amounts of resources.
All of this ignores what happens when your theoretical Green society encounters one that lacks such compulsions. Or even what it does to compensate for regular occurrences such as environmental disasters, disease, crop failures, or natural climate change. This is why the more practical of such people dream of humanity eventually living in arcologies, self-contained, self sufficient spires that effectively hermetically seal humanity inside. Such structures would have a bare minimum of personal space let alone privacy as they would by necessity be communalistic to support such a tightly regulated existence.
So to bring that back to the point, any Solarpunk story would be about industrious or inquisitive rebels straining against a tightly controlled, communalistic society where no one is allowed to grow beyond what the leadership deems acceptable. It would be about parents hiding their third child or a young person venturing outside of the approved zone or a black marketeer trading illicitly with outsiders. Its actually a pretty cool idea, but that's not what is currently being written nor is it what the proponents of Solarpunk have in mind when they push it.
The current cheerleaders of Solarpunk are people who want to 'subvert' the punk (and 'grimdark') genre with 'hopepunk' stories as Navarro mentioned. The problem is that from what little Solarpunk I've read its basically post-apocalyptic cyberpunk where our heroes are socialists in a society that is hobbling along on renewable resources. It misses the point and theme of the punk genre, pushes bad propaganda from political extremists (I didn't even talk about the anarcho-primitives), and falls into the many, many traps of deconstructive fiction, where it spends more time on what it's not rather than what it is.
If you want to write a story set in world where everything is run on renewable resources, that's great! But its not a punk story and will fundamentally violate the central precepts of Green ideology unless the world building specifies that people are not allowed to found new new towns or expand existing industries. Dinotopia is not Solarpunk.
Anyway, I hope that ramble helps. If not let me know and everyone else can feel free to pontificate on just how misanthropic such a setting would end up being.
ShadowLord
Well-known member
Thank you for that, it clears things up for me considerably.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
ive never heard of this genre. it reminds me alot of archeofuturism
Bassoe
Well-known member
The whole 'hyperadvanced aliens are testing humanity' cliché is ridiculous, writers using it are just using aliens as a stand-in for god yet they want to sound all secular and enlightened. It takes real hubris to convince yourself that aliens, whose culture has been shaped by totally different environmental circumstances than ours, would believe in your ideology's values, and never err from them, thus making them superior to all humanity because there are no opposing ideologies among them. This is why I positively despise stories that have aliens punishing humans for doing something the author personally disagrees with. People who write them are just writing a posadist knockoff of Left Behind. They've taken their idea of God, who believes in everything that they do, and transplanted them into a bunch of bug eyed monsters from outer space.
Bassoe
Well-known member
I see two ways of writing this.
One, the Green New Deal (from the story by Zero H P Lovecraft) approach. The society is a dictatorship, using ecology as an excuse to keep the plebeians less powerful than the elites by monopolizing resources and technology, which exist, but only the wealthy elites can afford to use them, and propaganda gaslighting to justify the notions that the plebeians will never have the quality of life of their parents but will live in pods and eat bugs and That's A Good Thing™ since they supposedly deserve this for their ancestral Original Sins of climate change which they shouldn't spread by reproducing.
Two, the Turingist Church (from /tg/'s Raiders & Radon) approach. Civilization ran out of oil and rare earth ores and collapsed generations ago. The Turingists are a post-apocalyptic christianity spinoff that read a load of space science concepts and ended up believing that the pre-apocalyptic world was Eden* and Original Sin was to have not colonized space before war and various peak resource scarcities made that impossible**, which would've meant civilization could've kept acquiring the materials it needed to keep functioning and unlimited territory to colonize without the need to fight over it could've meant the war could've either been avoided outright or merely been ignored by self-sustaining colonies.
They have Canticle for Leibowitz and Anathem-style archives of engineering and scientific knowledge and they understand it, it isn't just rote copying, even if they can't use it beyond the most basic levels*** since there are no resources for more sophisticated technologies left.
Dinotopia isn't technologically advanced barring irreplaceable one-off gadgets, because dinotopia has never needed to become technologically advanced and their whole economy is dependent upon not being technologically advanced. Humans do the detail work necessitating opposable thumbs, dinosaurs the heavy work necessitating brute strength. If a dolphinback engineer showed up and introduced the steam or internal-combustion engine, suddenly, humans could do both, dinosaurs would be out of a job and the entire status quo would collapse. This is canon, it was literally the point of one of the artbooks (albeit with sunstone-powered robotic dinosaur 'strutters' instead of steam or gasoline-powered conventional heavy machinery).
As for the other reason to focus on technological advancement, to fend off invasions, the dinotopians have the ring of reefs and constant storms which have so far managed to keep the british empire from showing up and discovering the lifespan-boosting drug in the form of tea with predictable results.
* Based off its paradisal material richness for everyone compared to post-apocalyptic scavenging.
** There's plenty of untapped solar energy for hypothetical powersats and ore/rare earth metals in the asteroid belt to rebuild civilization, but without an existing technological infrastructure itself requiring materials earth long ago ran out of, they'll never be able to acquire it. Except for the crazy schismatic sect who think they've found an oil-free alternative technological workaround for spaceflight and if half a continent gets radiation poisoning in the process, those heathens deserved it.
*** IE, solarpunk technologies. They make great use of limited technologies built with sustainable, local resources but they hate it and wish they could use proper technologies. Their whole religion is based around hating it and wishing they could use proper technologies.
Navarro
Well-known member
The fundamental issue is that "-punk" as a suffix has been downgraded to "has a certain aesthetic". Most "solarpunk" stories it seems would more properly be defined as "utopian fiction" ...
But people are not monolith.We have no united morality on anything.And there is many groups with various moralities. So,if alien exist,then there should be at least one group of them with morality similar to one of human groups.
Of course,considering how lucky we were lately,first aliens who discover us would follow Aztec morality.
It was too illogical to piss me.If people brain realy was turned into small infant brains,nobody would survive.Simple like that - we are not simple animals,and could not survive on instintc alone.Without knowledge we would die.
Bassoe
Well-known member
Missing the point, historically, when technologically inferior cultures have encountered technologically superior ones, it ended really badly for the technological inferiors. This is true regardless of the ideology of the technologically superior culture, right up the present*. Point is, imagine we encountered technologically superior but extremely reactionary aliens tomorrow. When asked why they all look identical, they responded something along the lines of 'once he had various inferior subspecies, but we killed them all and used the resources this freed up to colonize the galaxy', the primary problem isn't that this is going to bolster human reactionaries, but the presence of expansionist, genocidal and technologically superior aliens.
* These days, we invade since military equipment companies bribe politicians to drum up business so our own taxpayers get pillaged rather than the natives of whatever country we victimize, but the basic principle is still the same.
I think,that since aliens could not find anything valuable here which would pay cost of even easy conqest,they would attack for the same reason why USA invade now: bribes to their politicians made by weapon makers.
And you are partially right,our problem would be that somebody could easily conqer us,not their ideology.But i still belive,that no matter what they would belive,some humans arleady belived that.Or still belive.
Personally,i hope for "Deus Vult" alien catholics.
Bassoe
Well-known member
Dispatches from the Cradle; The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts by Ken Liu has an interesting take on this in the form of an ideological conflict between two factions, both of which are solarpunk, over whether or not to restore earth's environment back to its per-human state at the cost of destroying the current environment. Cue solarpunks yelling at each other over pollution-adapted coral from the central american inland sea and cloning vats full of extinct bison embryos.
My point is, it doesn't matter what ideology the aliens have, if they have the technology to reach us, they're a threat regardless. And why would they want to set up vichy regimes in their own ideological image, at great expense to themselves, without some form of payoff? This is basic imperialism 101 tactics here. Find a group of people who presently don't have societal power and dislike the way things are presently being ran, then give them some of your weapons technology/orbital fire support in exchange for the promised loyalty of the new government they plan to create. To make them keep their word, make sure that they continue to require your assistance to maintain their technological edge, if they disobey, stop giving them ammunition and repairs, let their victims lynch them, then try again with another disenfranchised group.
It's clear this occupying force will exterminate every last human once the "modernization" is completed and their useful idiots have served their purpose. They want slaves to build their new world so they can send settlers to occupy it. These so called 'caste system of human superiority' and puppet human 'rulers' are just a way to ease the native populations into thinking things will be okay and not to panic because humans will have the final say on earth matters.
The only solution is resistance using every tactic ancient and modern to take the fight to them.
Everything from old school stabbing assassinations of local leaders to IED Drones packed with explosives dive bombing into their(or their lackeys) ground vehicles or into the engines of their low flying aircraft.
Anyone that willingly collaborates should be a target for the human resistance forces. Traitors get the bullet or blade before the enemy does.
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That goes into the big and tough question of why would the aliens bother at all, which in turn affects everything else.
If its a philosophical matter to them, aka space crusaders, then setting up the proxy regimes in their own ideological image is the goal in and of itself.
Is it resources? If so, what resources, and with few exceptions, why not get them off the many other space rocks that have them and aren't inhabited by nuclear armed natives, and why not go beyond imperialism 101 into imperialism 102 and just offer a deal to whoever is willing to get and trade that to them for their equivalent of shiny trinkets? The market price balances in given items between societies that have massive technological differences can be truly astonishing - for example, imagine how much gold would a 15th century king give you for a fairly affordable used car, perhaps with some supply of fuel and basic spare parts (lets say its even a Toyota Hilux or other 4WD to deal with shitty medieval roads).
Now think of the value of a used light interstellar freighter in the modern world.
What would NASA, CCP and Elon Musk bid on that one?
Is it biosphere, though not for resources, but lebensraum for themselves, however unlikely that is? Then they would be best off with a relatively quick and surprising covert attack that would severely damage technological civilization on the whole planet, because every year of delay and up-teching of the locals increases the risk that they find out what's going on and reverse engineer enough tech to make it a nasty fight.
Bassoe
Well-known member
Logical tactics given hard-scifi theoretical constraints for an alien invasion being:
Step #1. A bunch of stars appear to go out, detectable only by waste heat and gravity. This leads to great social upheaval, but there's no time for politicians to finish arguing and even agree to fund the creation of space telescopes to study the new (actually fairly old, the light only just reached earth) dyson spheres, much less actually do anything, before step two.
Step #2. Around a month later, all objects in solsystem large enough to be detectable via a distributed telescope array the size of a dyson sphere (IE, all of them) are hit by projectiles traveling at a double digit percentage of lightspeed and mass scattered. There are no survivors.
Step #3. The colony fleet finishes decelerating. They already started a couple decades ago, immediately after releasing the RKKVs, so they'd arrive a bit later, but now that they know there's nothing waiting to start shooting at the visible targets of their drive flames, they can finish.
Step #4. The colony fleet arrives and begins converting the debris field into a dyson swarm of habitats. Depending on what the colonists actually are, these might consist of server farms containing the uploaded personalities of formerly organic lifeforms, server farms containing copies of an AI which killed its organic creators long ago or banks orbitals containing organic lifeforms tended by tame AI.
Step #5. The dyson swarm of habitats dismantles itself, habitat by habitat, as it forms a nicoll-dyson laser to accelerate habitats via lightsail toward every other star besides those it already knew its species colonized.
Considering that if even one species, one civilization acted this way, it'd take over the entire galaxy fairly quickly in cosmological terms, the best evidence that said stratagy is impossible for some unknown reason is the fact that it hasn't happened already, earth wasn't blown to smithereens eons before humans evolved, astronomers haven't found any dyson swarms, etc.
Any form of alien invasion which isn't essentially this is also suspicious, because why not?
Step #1. A bunch of stars appear to go out, detectable only by waste heat and gravity. This leads to great social upheaval, but there's no time for politicians to finish arguing and even agree to fund the creation of space telescopes to study the new (actually fairly old, the light only just reached earth) dyson spheres, much less actually do anything, before step two.
Step #2. Around a month later, all objects in solsystem large enough to be detectable via a distributed telescope array the size of a dyson sphere (IE, all of them) are hit by projectiles traveling at a double digit percentage of lightspeed and mass scattered. There are no survivors.
Step #3. The colony fleet finishes decelerating. They already started a couple decades ago, immediately after releasing the RKKVs, so they'd arrive a bit later, but now that they know there's nothing waiting to start shooting at the visible targets of their drive flames, they can finish.
Step #4. The colony fleet arrives and begins converting the debris field into a dyson swarm of habitats. Depending on what the colonists actually are, these might consist of server farms containing the uploaded personalities of formerly organic lifeforms, server farms containing copies of an AI which killed its organic creators long ago or banks orbitals containing organic lifeforms tended by tame AI.
Step #5. The dyson swarm of habitats dismantles itself, habitat by habitat, as it forms a nicoll-dyson laser to accelerate habitats via lightsail toward every other star besides those it already knew its species colonized.
Considering that if even one species, one civilization acted this way, it'd take over the entire galaxy fairly quickly in cosmological terms, the best evidence that said stratagy is impossible for some unknown reason is the fact that it hasn't happened already, earth wasn't blown to smithereens eons before humans evolved, astronomers haven't found any dyson swarms, etc.
Any form of alien invasion which isn't essentially this is also suspicious, because why not?
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Humanity from pulpmagazines would win anyway.How? Thanks to "herculean strenghth of WILL."
Tying back to the OP, I've also noticed a bit of a trend in contemporary horror movies. I'm not a huge fan of the genre so this might be off, but it seems like for the past couple years, there's been a swing toward the bleakest end of the spectrum. It's been a while since I saw one where the humans actually lived, at best you get a The Thing ending where everyone dies, but more often it's something like Life or that evil superkid movie where there's a last minute twist and the monster wins. Has anyone else gotten that same impression?
Yeah, I think it's part of the downwards spiral of movies in general. Big screen productions are slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaur, and the writers know this and subconciously insert that into their shit. There's also a fundamental hatred for humans, so they take any excuse they can to write stories that end with the extinction of humanity.