At the 2018 Clash of Realities conference, a major topic at its games studies summit was the existence of “utopias” in games—or, rather, the lack of it, compared to the disproportionate abundance of dystopias we actually see. There are several reasons for it that I don’t want to get into. But a prominent one among them is that, historically, every conceptual or practical attempt at creating a utopia either turned it into a dystopia fairly quickly, was dystopian to begin with, or constituted a utopia for some and a dystopia for others, with those “others” commonly in the majority.

Lately, however, there have been literary and cinematic concepts and movements dedicated to breaking out of this dichotomy, particularly solarpunk, hopepunk, and, to a degree, contemporary afrofuturism, as well as the concept of protopia—a term coined by Kevin Kelly in, I believe, this blog post—in general. (Not to forget the recent rise of the game type “Cozy Games.”)

Around 2018, at the time of the conference, I was writing my first Voidpunk novel. If you read the blurb, it sounds pretty bleak:

The Voidpunk universe is structured after Howard’s Hyborian Age and embedded in the Lovecraft Circle’s Mythos. It combines existential horror, artifact sf, and cyberpunk elements in an alternative far future setting where most Hominoids survived and evolved, ruled over by powerful interstellar entrarchies that rose from the Dark Ages after humanity’s devastating encounter with exoentities in the past.

And indeed, I started out pretty bleak—the first sentence of my first novel simply describes a spaceship, but that description is already dark and terrifying. But the conference topic had me thinking, and then the world got worse and worse, especially the situation in several countries that I call my cultural and intellectual home. And, suddenly, I realized that my concept had subtly shifted.

The Void is no longer a purely terrifying place, except that I steered clear of any “us vs. them” and “good vs. bad” from the start. Now, my universe still has its share of human baddies, but the overwhelming majority of all the people of all the human species living in the Void has become less aggressive in terms of outgroup hostility and a lot more inclusive than most specimens of that one human species we see today. And I even created a (not to be disclosed) backstory reason for it once I realized that I had been dialing down the “bleak future” aspects all along. Why writing up terrible dystopias when you can have your fill just by following the news!

Recently, Charlie Stross quipped on Mastodon:

Yesterday’s news leads me to forecast the next big thing in SF/F genre fiction: the Cosy Dystopia—a future or fantasy setting in which the backdrop is ghastly but the sympathetic protagonists are running a tea shop in the borderlands.

Think Warhammer 40,000 space marines, with added knitting. (Narrative focus STRONGLY on the knitting.)

That’s not quite where I’m heading, sure, and Charlie Stross probably neither. But while keeping my Voidpunk universe terrifying and precarious and full of hostile, horrible forces, I’ve slowly shifted away from making it dystopian and bleak. (Same for the Voidpunk pen-&-paper RPG I’m working on, of course.) Hopefully, and I’m quite optimistic here, once I switch to agent hunting after having finished my second novel, this concept will find an audience.