“Hopeful” and “dystopian”―not words that pair up naturally, are they? In our culture, we often think of hope as Emily Dickenson’s fluffy little thing with feathers. Most of us have read this verse at one time or another:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all”
I’ve met a lot of people who aren’t impressed with this kind of hope. It’s too ethereal for them. Too unreliable. Too fragile. They like the edgy tang of cynicism more than the cloudy fluff of hope.
If that’s how you feel, try a few lines from a different poem:
“Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.
Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.
It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path and bites you in the ass.
Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird, Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
These words, drawn from Catlin Seida’s poem ‘Hope’, are much closer to my sense of what the word means. I’ve thought through my articulation of hope quite a lot in the last few years. I imagine I'm not the only one. But I get called out and told to defend my stance a lot. Why? Because I’m O.E. Tearmann. And I write the “Aces High, Jokers Wild” series. A hopeful LGBT cyberpunk series.
Yeah, I get that look a lot.
So why the heck did I try to mix oil and water by writing a hopeful cyberpunk story? Simple: to show people that it can be done. And right now, it has to be.
Okay, let’s unpack a little bit of American storytelling history, to show you what I’m talking about. In the years after WWII, American mainstream storytelling had a definitive message: things are good, we are good, and we have always been good. Science fiction had a gee-whiz enthusiasm to it, and historical works were rousing stories of cowboys and indians. All the good guys wore white. This was partly because of something called the Hays Code. This would take another page to explain, so I’ll just say look it up, it’s an education. And it was partly because everyone was on a post-war high. Life was good if you were WEIRD WASPS. That is, if you were Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and if you were White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and Straight, life was looking up. Everything was fine. It had always been fine. It would always be fine. If you were on top.
That veneer of sunny optimism laid over our complicated American history began to tarnish as the Cold War sank its icy fingers into our culture right around 1947. Our storytelling got darker, and it turned inwards. We wrote out our fears more and more: fear of death by nuke. Fear of death by invasion. Fear of outside influence. Our stories took on a more suspicious tone: the aliens probably want to eat/penetrate/control us. The ants, the spiders, and the lizards are just waiting for a little nuclear juice to mutate into something that can eat/penetrate/control us. We saw monsters everywhere, except within.
For America, the uncomfortable social angst of the Cold War culminated in the dark disillusionment of Vietnam. That morass of a ‘police action’ shattered America’s concept of ourselves as The Good Guys Who Always Win. From 1965 to 1973, Americans saw their troops lose. Worse, they saw their troops commit atrocities. They saw their own students speak out, and get shot. We weren’t the victors anymore. We weren’t even the good guys. And our stories reflected it.
The storytelling only got grittier from there. In the post-War era, the Hays Code had artificially kept things light by banning and blackballing a lot of content. As its power waned, we got the kinds of stories we couldn’t tell before: crooked cops and dark alleys, moral ambiguity and difficult social themes. Though a lot of these stories were pretty exploitive, they were necessary. American storytelling needed something other than the plastic smile it had been wearing. It tried on a dark trench coat. This change intersected with the waning of another kind of story, the one that glorified the colonial past. The Civil Rights era started to get its feet under it in the 1950s, and by the 1960s it had enough power to start calling creators out. It’s a lot harder to sell the plantation story when a Black man can stand up and say ‘my grandma was raped here, and my grandpa was whipped to death over there.’ It’s a lot harder to play cowboys and indians when the Indian stands up and says ‘you shot my grandad, and you built your house on his bones.’
So, storytelling couldn’t go back. But it didn’t know how to go forward. That meant we got a lot of experimentation. We got the New Wave Fiction of the 60s and 70s, and that gave rise to cyberpunk and its critiques of everything going on socially and economically in the 80s and 90s. Different authors tried different approaches in the following decades: Heinlein figured we’d just head out and start another round of good old pioneering in space. LeGuin gave us the idea that we might evolve socially, politically, and emotionally. Butler showed us how we might reconcile our complicated past and step into a future that we can barely conceptualize. All these works showed us possibilities in books.
But the movies? The movies needed to have mass appeal. They needed to have ACTION. So they showed only futures that were gritty, dark, and violent. With the few hopeful and shining exceptions of E.T., Cocoon, Star Trek, Back To The Future, and the original Star Wars series, Hollywood gave us the same message again and again: the future is going to be a fricking disaster, so grab a gun, strap in and enjoy the ride. They gave us Mad Max, Water World, Running Man, Soylent Green, Aliens, Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, Escape From New York, Tron, Repo Man, and later Matrix, reboots of Blade Runner, Repo Man, Terminator, The Road…you get the drift. The future, according to our most accessible and easily digestible media? It’s going to suck.
The thing is, humans are narrative beings. We tell ourselves stories, and we take on stories we’re told to add to the ones we use to understand our world. So what happens when a culture keeps telling itself ‘people are stupid, selfish, and cruel. They’re greedy and dangerous. They’re going to wreck everything’? People start acting like it’s true, because it’s the only script they’ve got. And then you get the 2010s and the 2020s.
Some people will say this is hyperbole: stories don’t change the way people act. Personally, I think it’s the other way around. The way people act is based on stories. How we tell our story causes us to act in certain ways, good or bad. Is the drug addict a criminal or someone who’s sick and needs help? Is the mother with two kids and too little money foolish and negligent, or down on her luck and in need of a little help? Are people intrinsically motivated to find purpose and belonging, or are they inherently lazy and have to be coerced to work?
The stories we tell decides the policies we vote on, the laws we create, and the way we do everything else in a society. And the story we’re telling right now? It’s killing us. It’s killing the community of unhoused people who get written off as ‘lazy’. It’s killing the people without decent working conditions who get told they didn’t try hard enough in school. It’s killing the people without prospects. Without health care. Without hope. In a subtler way, it’s impacting us all.
“Pessimism,” Psychology Today tells us, “while it may be useful in isolation or in moderation, is associated with anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, hostility, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Pessimism may be a risk factor for heart disease and other physical and mental health conditions.” A deep dive into the topic shows some pretty nasty stuff: living in a constant high-cortisol state brought on by a deluge of negative emotions shrinks the brain, damages the heart, and can cause strokes.
Long story short: assuming you’re doomed means you will be.
Okay, so. We’ve hit this point. We’re here and now, in 2025. We’ve got, barring a couple exceptions, a really dark social concept of what the future looks like. We don’t want to live in a dark future, but it feels inevitable. All the happy futures look ridiculously utopian, all the depressing futures look inevitable, and we’re stuck.
Now what do we do? We can’t go back to the plastic-perfect sunshine stories of the 50s. They proved themselves false. We can’t believe in Utopia if we watch the news. But these brutal stories we’re telling ourselves now are going to kill us, one way or another.
So, we start telling a new kind of story. We don’t talk about utopia. We don’t put our hands together and wish for better. This is when we stop despairing, stop hoping, and start resolving.
See, I don’t use the word ‘hope’ very often anymore. It has too many fluffy connotations. I use the word ‘resolve’. Resolve is something like hope, but it’s grown up. Resolve is a word with dirt under its nails and mud on its boots. Resolve grins with a split lip and wipes the blood off skinned knees, ready to get up and go at it again. Resolve gets things done.
I have very little patience with the defeatist attitude. It doesn’t move you forward. It doesn’t get anything done. It’s emotionally lazy to say ‘oh, can’t be fixed’ and ease a little deeper into the couch cushions. Pessimism doesn’t ask you to do anything. That’s what makes it seductive. It says ‘just lie back, there’s nothing you can do.’
My work began with looking that pessimistic attitude in the eye and calling bullshit.
The series I write began as a project in 2016. The political changes of those days were—not to put too fine a point on it—appalling. Watching the norms and courtesies of our political system buckle one by one under the strain was miserable. I watched as the communities I’m part of—artists, writers, young folks living in the heart of Denver’s Downtown, and LGBT folx— went through a cycle of despair, anger and nihilism. And I didn’t know what to do.
During this time, I saw a lot of hopeful people end up in despair and, in some cases, turn cynical. ‘Everything’s a mess and nothing can fix it’, is still a common refrain, and there’s plenty of reasons. I heard an awful lot of defeated ‘we’re screwed’ talk, and I'm still hearing it. And you know what? It pissed me off to the point where I said, ‘fine, let’s start from ‘we’re screwed’. Let’s write something that starts at the nadir of what our society could become. And then let’s write our way out of the dark, to show people how it’s done.” And so I started doing it.
I wrote the kind of America we’re afraid of. I put my characters in it. I took all those cyberpunk vibes I’d inherited as kids born in the 80s, and I intentionally subverted them. Our characters walk through neon-lit sensory overloads of streets that scream advertisements at passersby. Their community teaches meditation techniques used to keep your equilibrium. They live in a country owned by seven corporations. They fight to bring back democracy. Their society assigns every person a social credit score to rank what resources they’re allowed access to. Our characters subvert that and give out food, medicine, and help for free. The general society treats all workers as disposable. Our characters say that every person is important, and with a little help, every person can do great things.
I show my characters handling events based on my own experiences: with mutual support, community cooperation, and resolve. I draw on the Punk ethos. What is Punk, exactly? No, it’s not a suffix that means ‘stuff’. And it’s not the kid who didn’t give Grandpa the respect he thinks he deserves. The Punk ethos is most easily encapsulated in the statement ‘the world is broken, and that pisses me off. I’m gonna fix it.’ Punk is the ethos of figuring out how to string cables on San Juan Island because the local internet provider is useless, or helping Black women learn construction as they build their own houses in Baltimore. The Punk ethos is saying ‘yeah, I see the way it is. And it sucks. And I’m not playing this game. I’m changing it.’
I draw on my circle’s experiences as racially and gender-marginalized people. Those of us who have known marginalization know that to give up is to disappear. In our own world, we have incredible examples of marginalized communities who built themselves up and learned to thrive in the face of the odds. I draw on that strength. I read books on mutual aid and the power of the little people: books on the Union Movements of the 1890s and the 1920s, books by Srdja Popovic, Rutger Bregman and Kate Raeworth, Rebecca Solnit and Heather McGhee, Kim Stanley Robinson and Rob Hopkins. I drew on the ideas of a quieter kind of leadership, one based in bringing out the best in your people. I showcase the power of small actions through our character dynamics. As I wrote and read, I bumped into other works that were like what I was doing: Emma Bull’s Bone Dance. Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. Last Tango In Cyberspace and Doughnut Economics, New York 2140 and Black Stars, the “Monk and Robot” series and the “Nothing Is Promised” series. I found so many books like these that I started keeping a list. You can check it out at https://www.oetearmann.com/positive-book-list.
I found new names for what I was looking for: Solarpunk. Hope-punk. Uplit and Noblebright. These are not stories of perfect places. They’re stories of healing places. Places where people are choosing, in small ways every day, to make things better. They’re up against incredible odds: entrenched power and feral climates, cruel storms and bitter losses. But every day, they resolve to keep trying. So can we. Even in the darkest of futures, we everyday people can still take care of each other, hang onto each other, and do something about the state of things. That is what our stories need to tell us right now. That is what we need to be teaching our kids and telling each other.
So yeah. I’m O.E. Tearmann. And I’m writing hopeful queer cyberpunk. My characters do live in a very dark world, because I wanted to showcase the kind of scrappy resolve that stands up and does what needs doing in spite of the odds. Our characters are not hopeful, in the sense of wishing for a better day to come. They are resolved. They don't have any delusions. They know exactly how grim the odds are. But they're not backing down. They look the situation in the face and say ‘yeah, this sucks. I know. So what are we going to do about it?’
I hope to help my readers do the same.
O.E. Tearmann Bringing their own experiences as a marginalized author to the page with flawed and genuine characters, O.E. Tearmann’s work has been described as “Firefly for the dystopian genre.”
Tearmann lives in Colorado with two cats, their partner, and the belief that individuals can make humanity better through small actions. They are a recipient of the 2023 Feathered Quill award, a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and the Queer Scifi group. In their spare time, they teach workshops on writing GLTBQ characters, plant gardens to encourage sustainable agricultural practices, and play too many video games. Find out more at https://oetearmann.com
Credit:
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the Thing With Feathers-314." Poetry Foundation (1924)
Seida, Caitlin. “My Broken Voice: Poetry From the Edge and Back”. Lulu.com (2018)
Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. "Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will." Psychology Today 1 (2017)
Art Character art by Olivia Wylie
Despair Ends by Banksy
Hands in the Dirt by Kelly Loise Judd (Swanbones on Etsy!)
“We Can Grow A Better World” by Eliot AKA Talons Dipped In Ink on Tumblr
