2015: Singularity

HopePunk is Delphina's performance in the Creative Olympics

“I am a work of art. I am not the leftovers of humanity. I am not a vestigial organ floating inside the belly of Orion. I am meat and blood and electricity, but we… we, the collective breath of the human race, are more than all of that combined. We speak the language of the soul because encoded deep in that spark, we know: we are created. And someday the Creator will come back and say, My children, what have you done? And I will say, I am still here, flesh and bone and aching heart. Still sweating and fighting and making sweet love. And in that transcendent act, I have become the creator, making again in the Creator’s image, reaching for a kind of perfection not free of mistakes but forged into realness through them.”

2017: Mindjack, Part II

HopePunk is Zeph, the cynic, deciding to care...

The way she looks at me sometimes, even now, when she’s hurting and angry, and I’m sure she’s railing at the world inside her head, but she still has that bright expectation that the world is a good place. A decent place. Or that if it’s not, it should be.

That’s something worth fighting for.

“We’re going to fight this, Tessa. And we’re going to win.”

Her eyes glass up. “How do you know that?”

“Because we have to.” Then I pull her in for a hug, and she’s no longer looking to the door, she’s just holding onto me, and at that moment, I believe it. The good things in the world are stronger than the Tillers and Wrights and Simpsons. The people who want to disrupt and destroy for their own reasons and chew up people along the way. I believe this is a fight we can win.

Because I have to.

2019: The Last Mystic

HopePunk is not just saving yourself...

While Singularity was HopePunk from the start, The Last Mystic was the first book I wrote where I was consciously exploring the idea of HopePunk with my work. 

"Because he killed her. Not directly—I don’t much like Marcus, but he’s not that kind of monster. His ambition blinded him. The sin of ambition is still among us. In Marcus’s hubris, he ignored the warning signs. He was convinced the pill he gave his mother would ascend her just as it had for him. He talked her into it. And then the procedure killed her… as it did for so many in the first Singularity. Those deaths marked humanity’s true original sin. The conscious one that Marcus—and all ascenders—needs to atone for. Not as punishment, but as confession. A reconciliation with what they lost. What they failed to understand. That’s why I’m here, as I see in a flash of clarity that makes this artificial world around me seem to pulse and expand, just a little.

Marcus sees it, and fear grips his face. He casts around for the source.

It’s not just me making his world move—it’s him. We are, after all, connected. There must be no purging of the past, no erasure of what we were before. We have to embrace all of it, and leave no one behind. This much I know. But Marcus won’t get there by staying in this hologram of his own guilt."

2020: Nothing is Promised

What Sue's Writing Now

Life in 2020 is... fraught. That's a word that keeps banging around in my head, and it seems to fit every day. I don't need to explain it—worldwide pandemic, political and racial unrest, a tremendously uncertain future. We're all living it.

Which is why I'm writing a new HopePunk series, urgently, right now.

I'm not inventing calculus during the plague, but on top of keeping my family safe and navigating all the sudden obstacles thrown in our way to simply cast a ballot, I'm diving deep into this new genre, in both form and content. In 2018, I joined a writer's group called The New Mythos, dedicated to exploring the idea that the SF world needed a new way of telling stories. Of course, we were all actively engaged in that before the group formed, but our collection of futurists and authors have been bouncing ideas around, sharing and poking at the concept. It's not limited to HopePunk, but that genre sits comfortably in this domain. The concept is not easy to quantify, much less put on the page. But it's exciting as all heck, and exactly what I feel driven to write right now.

And driven is the right word. For a while, I wasn't sure I could actually write this during the pandemic. Whether I had the energy and emotional bandwidth to rise to the challenge of this work. And the virus may yet scuttle my plans—it's already stricken friends and family. Planning anything in 2020 feels audacious. 

But it feels urgent to write this right now, in the middle of all of this. Creating HopePunk at a time when things are hard, when everything is terrifying, and the world is fraught... that's what this genre was born from. That's the scream of the birthing, the cry of the newborn, the promise of new life. 

It's all there. Right now.

So I'm taking the leap to tell you I'm working on this even though it's not done. Daring to invite you on the journey with me, even though I'm not at all sure we'll make it through. I am halfway through the first of four books, so that's something.

Nothing is Promised. It's the the truth... and also the title of the series. 

More soon!

Peace and Love,
Sue