I call my version of this "Pulp-Punk" a fusion of the pulps from the 1920's with the punks of the 2020s, with a "decopunk" style wrapper. Too often those wanting to slap "Punk" at the end of a new sci fi trend is much like slapping "gate" at the end of a scandal. Several of these are borderline meaningless, and in 25 years will be looked at as quaint games of makebelieve. But for now, they're handles on larger buckets of information as to what the reader can expect. Raygun Gothic and Planetary Romance are being rolled together to create "Raypunk". The public must be trained to look for this and understand what it means.
Honestly there's nothing "punk" about it save for the fact that male writers, sick of the feminist agenda driven pablum the publishers are pumping out like raw sewage into the river, are putting out as indie authors. The punk rebellious streak is it. Cyberpunk persists because it was the first "punk". But now you have so many nonsensical labels of punk, and what's worse is that they are so rarely known by people in the mainstream (not talking about rabid fans of the new pseudo genres) that they are ineffective search terms. People don't sit down and look for "solarpunk" unless they've already become trained to use that term. Or Cattlepunk, atompunk, decopunk... any of the derivatives out there. Hell most people don't know about nanopunk or biopunk which show up more frequently... or at least on par with dieselpunk. Steampunk is the only one that sort of made the jump to Cyberpunk levels because they operate on the same linguistic concept of tech in the setting.
This is the new trend of fiction: writing stories men want to read. Going back to the old styles of storytelling and fiction. Too many want to have their cake of the dying post-modernist, politically driven, anti-masculine, evangelistic deconstruction movement currently ruling all major publishing. Rac Press, Chris Kennedy Press, Jumpmaster Press, Cannon Publishing, Three Ravens Publishing and to some extent Baen (which it seems views these smaller publishers as their farm league) are leading the way into a new idea of publishing.
Some have labeled this movement the "Iron Age" after Raz0rfist's popularization of the term. I think it's bigger than that, and have called it "Aspirationalist". Why that? Because it's a form of storytelling that aspires to lift up the objective, eternal truths in life. To celebrate what is best of man, philosophically. To place virtue back on her pedistal when decades of post-modernist critical theory swilling barbarians have smashed her into the mud. Grimedull and anti-humanist evangelistic screeds are quickly losing ground and reverting back toward what their original founding purposes are, if the current GenCon Writer's Symposium and SFWA scandals are any indicator. Wokism is starting to wither like a hot-house plant after the first touch of frost. It's not dead, but the leaves are going brown and it's wilted, but beware, it may be a perennial and we must be ready with the weedkiller in the spring.
Other than that, dear public, authors and new publishers are producing things to fill that deep spiritual itch for entertainment that isn't a sermon first and entertainment maybe later. Go seek it out lest it vanish again. The choice is yours to make and your dollars are the only votes that matter.
Ray Punk is harder to define than the other 'punks chopping up the larger genre of Retro Futurism. It's the SF of the 20's and 30's, heavy on the Art Nouveau and daring do done across all of space.
The Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials are the most accessible examples, and your comparison to Diesel Punk is apt. Think of it as Diesel Punk freed of most constraints turned loose on an unsuspecting galaxy and you won't be far wrong.
It's a lot of fun, IF the writers can remember that fun is the point.
Cyberpunk worked well because it was nearly contemporaneous with actual punk rock and post-punk music, especially goth - so, the late 1970s and early 1980s - you had the grime of the streets, and the edginess of the avant garde of the art world mixing together, with that post-1970s economic mess we had. So, there's a legitimacy to the term "cyberpunk" that the others lack. I know some of the genuine cyberpunk classic works are 1989 - 1991 vintage, but I think they're close enough to the source period to retain legitimacy. For the others, even steampunk (which I'm just going to be open about, I don't care for it as a style personally, it does nothing for me, but to each their own), those are all backwards projections - it's us layering a modern outlook on the 1890s, or the 1920s and 1930s. The one useful bit that came out of the comics series The Authority, was to refer to the "ray punk era" as "Scientific Romance" - and I think that works extremely well.
Cyberpunk worked because we were punks doing cyber stuff. Steampunk did cyber stuff with steam so that sort of worked. The other names? 🤣🤣🤣
The other names? All marketing.
I call my version of this "Pulp-Punk" a fusion of the pulps from the 1920's with the punks of the 2020s, with a "decopunk" style wrapper. Too often those wanting to slap "Punk" at the end of a new sci fi trend is much like slapping "gate" at the end of a scandal. Several of these are borderline meaningless, and in 25 years will be looked at as quaint games of makebelieve. But for now, they're handles on larger buckets of information as to what the reader can expect. Raygun Gothic and Planetary Romance are being rolled together to create "Raypunk". The public must be trained to look for this and understand what it means.
Honestly there's nothing "punk" about it save for the fact that male writers, sick of the feminist agenda driven pablum the publishers are pumping out like raw sewage into the river, are putting out as indie authors. The punk rebellious streak is it. Cyberpunk persists because it was the first "punk". But now you have so many nonsensical labels of punk, and what's worse is that they are so rarely known by people in the mainstream (not talking about rabid fans of the new pseudo genres) that they are ineffective search terms. People don't sit down and look for "solarpunk" unless they've already become trained to use that term. Or Cattlepunk, atompunk, decopunk... any of the derivatives out there. Hell most people don't know about nanopunk or biopunk which show up more frequently... or at least on par with dieselpunk. Steampunk is the only one that sort of made the jump to Cyberpunk levels because they operate on the same linguistic concept of tech in the setting.
This is the new trend of fiction: writing stories men want to read. Going back to the old styles of storytelling and fiction. Too many want to have their cake of the dying post-modernist, politically driven, anti-masculine, evangelistic deconstruction movement currently ruling all major publishing. Rac Press, Chris Kennedy Press, Jumpmaster Press, Cannon Publishing, Three Ravens Publishing and to some extent Baen (which it seems views these smaller publishers as their farm league) are leading the way into a new idea of publishing.
Some have labeled this movement the "Iron Age" after Raz0rfist's popularization of the term. I think it's bigger than that, and have called it "Aspirationalist". Why that? Because it's a form of storytelling that aspires to lift up the objective, eternal truths in life. To celebrate what is best of man, philosophically. To place virtue back on her pedistal when decades of post-modernist critical theory swilling barbarians have smashed her into the mud. Grimedull and anti-humanist evangelistic screeds are quickly losing ground and reverting back toward what their original founding purposes are, if the current GenCon Writer's Symposium and SFWA scandals are any indicator. Wokism is starting to wither like a hot-house plant after the first touch of frost. It's not dead, but the leaves are going brown and it's wilted, but beware, it may be a perennial and we must be ready with the weedkiller in the spring.
Other than that, dear public, authors and new publishers are producing things to fill that deep spiritual itch for entertainment that isn't a sermon first and entertainment maybe later. Go seek it out lest it vanish again. The choice is yours to make and your dollars are the only votes that matter.
Ray Punk is harder to define than the other 'punks chopping up the larger genre of Retro Futurism. It's the SF of the 20's and 30's, heavy on the Art Nouveau and daring do done across all of space.
The Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials are the most accessible examples, and your comparison to Diesel Punk is apt. Think of it as Diesel Punk freed of most constraints turned loose on an unsuspecting galaxy and you won't be far wrong.
It's a lot of fun, IF the writers can remember that fun is the point.
Cyberpunk worked well because it was nearly contemporaneous with actual punk rock and post-punk music, especially goth - so, the late 1970s and early 1980s - you had the grime of the streets, and the edginess of the avant garde of the art world mixing together, with that post-1970s economic mess we had. So, there's a legitimacy to the term "cyberpunk" that the others lack. I know some of the genuine cyberpunk classic works are 1989 - 1991 vintage, but I think they're close enough to the source period to retain legitimacy. For the others, even steampunk (which I'm just going to be open about, I don't care for it as a style personally, it does nothing for me, but to each their own), those are all backwards projections - it's us layering a modern outlook on the 1890s, or the 1920s and 1930s. The one useful bit that came out of the comics series The Authority, was to refer to the "ray punk era" as "Scientific Romance" - and I think that works extremely well.