I don't care about your lush worldbuilding

Over the last few years I've read a lot of science fiction books which have contained lavish praise for their worldbuilding.  And in most cases those books have left me cold.

Why is this?  It's generally because that lavish worldbuilding sets out some awful dystopia.  Often it involves some brutal underworld, or the main characters trapped in a hellhole of a prison.  The prison is always in a crumbling, dying, lawless city which is its own kind of prison, with no-go areas and brutal gang culture.

By the time I've finished one of these books I feel like my brain's had a good beating.  For that's another thing these books always contain.  There's always a psychopath character in charge, who delights in beating people senseless.  Or, as in the book I've just finished, shooting random people for no good reason.  And in nearly all these books the main character is a killer.  Sometimes a deliberate murderer, sometimes a killer by mistake.  And they usually have such a hopeless attitude to life that it's painful following them.

This is the territory of grimdark, and this is how low it's sunk in the last few years.  And it is one of the reasons why I've not read a great many works that a lot of people enthuse over.  As I've said many times, I'm a hopepunk writer, and I can't be doing with all that blood and darkness.  And in case you're thinking that this is the domain of male writers, that's not true.  Two of the bloodiest books I've read recently were by women writers.

When I read something like this I don't give the author another chance. They're off my reading lists. So what can I turn to instead?

A trawl of the internet reveals only a handful of hopepunk books.  Tor.com recently listed five, one of which I don't even consider hopepunk.  Cat Rambo, ex Science Fiction Writers of America President, lists a dozen on her blog, with a list of less than a dozen new hopepunk novels coming out this year.

Right now, with the news peddling horror from the real world every day, I have never needed  hopepunk more.  So I shall be seeking out those hopeful narratives.  Perhaps some of them will become beacons of light in the midst of this unremitting grimdark.