Featuring 12 powerful and award-winning voices from Planet Democracy

Stories of Hope, Courage, Unity & Compassion
A special edition of Mithila Review devoted to Hopepunk -- a literature of resistance, which seeks to inspire compassionate thought and positive action.

"Hope" and "punk" are the two key elements that make hopepunk interesting and powerful. Characters who don't quit, who resist oppression, and fight for justice, for change, for democracy. There can't be hopepunk without an underlying and undying faith in global democracy and freedom.

Planet Democracy: Table of Contents

FICTION

In Robert Bagnall's story "The Ones Who Scream America," Quaker school teacher Sally Nodal fights against the voices she hears imploring her to hate. When the Secret Service traps her into helping them, she learns she's not alone in hearing those voices, voices that define a poisonous zeitgeist. Realizing the enormity of it all, Sally fights back -- and learns a bit about modern art along the way as well.

Buzz Dixon transports us to a blazing hot future in his cinematic story "Trucker," where three of the last human truck drivers save a desperate mother and her child.

In Eve Morton's story "Milkman," two women band together to help feed a future of children who would otherwise starve.

In "This is My Home" by Mark Rivett, we come face to face with the power of technology and collective action in changing the world -- whether we want it to or not.

"In The Rhythms of the World," Johnny Caputo takes us to a distant time, where many of the ills caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels have been mitigated by advanced plant and fungal technologies. But these bio-innovations don't come free of consequences. Told from the point of view of a pollution-devouring fungus, this story explores the relationships between humankind, the technologies we create, and the incomprehensibly complex cycles of life of which we are but one part.

In "Harefoot Express," Paulo da Costa transports us to a future that still holds hope for human existence, including more inclusive and democratic forms of governing, as well as new strategies for the long process of restoring the earth's natural ecosystems and diminishing the human footprint. What will tourism and holiday travel look like a century from now? This is a time when individual limitations are accepted and understood in light of the collective steps necessary to move past a post-apocalyptic era and a more sustainable future.

In Jetse de Vries, "Zen and the Art of Gaia Maintenance," humanity seems to have finally figured out what it means to be part of the solution and not the problem.

POETRY

Mari Ness's poem "Horsemen" offers a brief moment of respite -- a poetic break from the preceding fiction.

J. D. Harlock's poem "Brighter Than The Last" melds solarpunk and sunshine noir to explore the harsher currents underlying our path to a solarpunk future.

In Angela Acosta's "Paradise of the Abyss," we travel to the Yucatán Peninsula and take a tour of a burgeoning civilization, Paradise of the Abyss. There, young Piedad learns how to revitalize Earth's ancient impact crater using the knowledge of Mayan ancestors and million-world networks lightyears across.

In Florence Lenaers' poem, she asks: What would a school curriculum offer in a hopeful future? Written as a poetical take on this question, "School of Continuing Education: Excerpt of the Course Catalog" crystallized from a twofold view of education: as both an interdisciplinary web & an indefatigably continuing endeavour.

In "In My Utopias," Gretchen Rockwell presents a series of sonnets that imagines five different utopias, looking outward as well as inward to imagine hopeful futures.

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