
Retrofuturism - ccozan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism
======
aresant
Not sure there’s a finer visual artist to produce in the medium of
retrofuturism than Syd Mead - passed away late last year unfortunately but
left an inspiring catalog and vision of the future that I imagine will endure
a very long time ->

[https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-syd-mead/](https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-
syd-mead/)

~~~
cxr
Simon Stålenhag does really great work that if not considered retro-futurism
proper is something else that doesn't seem to have a name but certainly is at
least in a space adjacent to retro-futurism.

[http://www.simonstalenhag.se/](http://www.simonstalenhag.se/)

~~~
jonnydubowsky
Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) created an amazing adaptation of Stalenhag's
artwork for Amazon. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and definitely worth a
watch.

[https://www.engadget.com/amazon-tales-from-the-loop-simon-
st...](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-tales-from-the-loop-simon-stalenhag-
making-of-140005163)

------
bpiche
Gibson's excellent collection of short stories, 'Burning Chrome', contains a
story called 'The Gernsback Continuum' which is very explicitly a
retrofuturist work, I think. Maybe one of the best! In the first few
paragraphs of the story he also uses the term 'raygun gothic' to describe this
idea. I won't spoil it for you, but there are people in pulp sci-fi
spacesuits.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum)

~~~
steve_gh
One of my favourite William Gibson stories. A little gem!

~~~
bpiche
Indeed :)

------
chubot
There is an analogy to computing here. I mentioned a couple of 30+ year old
books here about what the future of software would be:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100)

by Brad Cox (inventor of Objective C) and David Gelertner (CS professor and
entrepreneur).

I guess you could make Retrofuturistic software now by writing modern versions
of those old ideas (which didn't turn out to be economically feasible /
adopted, at least in the exact form predicted, although in some cases they
were influential.)

------
flanbiscuit
Back in the Google Reader days I subscribed to a few Retofuture blogs. Was
really into this stuff back in the late 90s and early 00s. Love the scientific
optimism. Not surprising that I am a huge fan of EPCOT, it had a huge impact
on me as kid going there in the 80s.

This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it:
[https://paleofuture.com/](https://paleofuture.com/)

~~~
JetSpiegel
> This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it:
> [https://paleofuture.com/](https://paleofuture.com/)

Matt Novak moved to Gizmodo a while back:
[https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/](https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/)

Did not know he had that site as an archive.

------
peter303
Various parts of Disneyland exhibit versions of retrofuturism.

First is the original tomorrowland, a future of rocketships, futuristic cars.

Next came EPCOT of the 1970s on the heels of Earth Day and environmental
sensibilities.

Then both tomorrowland and EPCOT were reburbished with a future of computers
and videao games.

Most recently it is the Star Wars experience "long ago and far away" another
blast from the 1970s.

~~~
narag
I love 60s and 70s retrofuturist style, white everywhere and rounded shapes
being the most recognizable marks. Starwars was very much in that style: R2
and Luke, with a revival in episode I and maybe II. Rest of the movies were
much darker.

------
Strilanc
See also: Zeerust [1]

> _Something — a character design, a building, anything — used to be someone
> 's idea of futuristic. Nowadays though, it ironically has a quaint sort of
> datedness to it more reminiscent of the era the work came from_

For example, a science fiction show from the 50s showing a video phone with _a
rotary dial_.

1:
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust)

------
undershirt
“the future according to the past” as my writing teacher called it quite
pithily

~~~
sitkack
the bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future
according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past.

It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite
in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it
works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless
and love your future self.

~~~
undershirt
that’s profound. we should have drinks.

your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of
the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and
provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our
transcendence, and the world.

I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time,
timeless.

~~~
sitkack
In the zeitgeist of HN, The Fence [1] and that everyone was doing the best
they could at the time, we need to have empathy both for the past and for the
future. That is why we strive to make things better.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)

~~~
undershirt
chesterton’s fence is great. I’ve recently appreciated the synthesis of the
conservative and progressive impulses—to respect what has come before as it
encodes unseen wisdom, but to recognize that there are fundamentally new
things happening that we must account for.

------
solarkraft
Thanks for giving it a name, I love this stuff. Old visions of the future are
amazing. I love the German film "Richtung 2000" (towards 2000) from 1972 [0]
(should be understandable auto-translated). It's great to get a sense of the
situation at the time (oil crisis, the aero train just having been announced)
and evaluate what of it has actually happened.

They were right (albeit about 15 years off) about many major things: Home
automation, shopping and talking over the internet, a lot of work being
automated away, the psychological issues these innovations cause ...

Sadly they were also wrong about many of the great things that should've
happened by now. Space exploration has barely progressed (damn, I'm glad
SpaceX exists!) and we still don't care nearly enough about our
environment/quality of life to have electric vehicles and good local transit.

It's weird to see that so many of the things going on today were so
predictable. It paints a concering picture of _our_ future.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY)

------
valeg
Netflix's "Maniac" is an interesting recent example of retrofuturism in a
show.

------
rayalez
Fallout is probably my favorite example of that.

~~~
pm90
Came here to say this. Not a video game fan but the series has a charm that I
found very hard to explain to friends.

The genesis of that world is interesting enough too: a post-apocalyptic world
which mixes the old and the new out of necessity, rather than a deliberate
desire to model things on the past.

------
dang
Related from 2019:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570)

------
mseepgood
The future was better in the past.

~~~
krebs_liebhaber
Mark Fisher (RIP) made a good point in this vein: our vision for the future is
stuck in the '70s and '80s. If you watch a really old sci-fi movie like
Forbidden Planet[0] (or listen to its rather incredible proto-industrial
soundtrack[1]), you get the distinct feeling that it's "cheesy" or "wrong",
that its vision of the future has fallen greatly out of sync with our own.
This feeling diminishes as you go forward in time, and basically subsides
entirely once you reach the eighties. Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, Blade
Runner, Akira... all "futuristic", even to modern eyes and ears. Is this due
to improvements in visual effects and electronic instrumentation, or have we
"given up" on the future in a very real sense?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unSrf-
htPbk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unSrf-htPbk)

------
gitgud
People once envisioned a fantastical future, where _energy_ was practically
free, allowing endless possibilities for transport and construction.

What almost nobody predicted is that _information_ would become _practically
free_ thanks to the internet....

~~~
m4rtink
Well, energy is also almost free once you get some megascale space projects
going. Sun is putting out a lot of energy that currently just radiates out to
empty space.

------
ysr23
There is a nice video 'in praise of retrofuturism' on the BBC Ideas page:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of-
retrofuturis...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of-
retrofuturism/p081y8lk)

------
rutherblood
this remembering of the past and what they thought about us can mostly only
mean one thing: we ourselves can't and haven't been able to think of the
future.

~~~
jbay808
I mean, there were also some remarkably prescient predictions made at the
time. But the more accurate they were, the less likely they'd define a
retrofuturistic artistic genre.

------
SomeoneFromCA
Although, it is obvious, you cannot be close to the reality if you trying to
predict more than 10 years upfront, to be more or less realistic, you have to
go back from the present back as many years as you want to go into future and
observe what did not change. Then extrapolate to the future that has changed
and what has not. Say in 10 years we'll still have AMD64 computers on our
desks, albeit 50% faster, we'll still be running Windows and Linux, we;ll
probably have more than 10% cars running on electricity, we'll still be
wearing jeans and t-shirts, yet there will be subtle change in the social
order, perhaps a bad pandemic, change in social networking platforms etc.

~~~
close04
We can't really imagine the distant future because we are very biased about
the past and present. And we also can't account for developments that are
entirely new.

People always imagined the future full of flying cars because cars and planes
were the big thing so the combination must also be big. But nobody really
imagined "social networks" 100 years ago, which are way bigger now than flying
cars. They had no indication that this could possibly be a thing, at least not
in their current form. We imagined/had forums and all sorts of communities but
not really close to the current idea of social media.

~~~
goto11
Science-fiction tend to underestimate social changes compared to technological
changes. The classic example is Asimov where we have an intergalactic empire
thousands of years in the future but with gender roles stuck in the 1950's.
Videophones are everywhere in SF, but who predicted people would prefer text
messaging with emojis?

Smartphones and climate change crisis was predicted many times, but who
predicted transsexual rights would become a divisive political issue in the
US?

~~~
close04
SciFi creators are also bound by the fact that their creations must be
commercial successes. Touching on sensitive social topics can get in the way
of that and it's the best way to get a lynch mob at their door. So even if one
could have predicted in the '30s anything related to race and gender-related
emancipation they would have been buried along with their work. Fancy
futuristic tech? Yes, please! Radical social reform ideas? Solid nope.

------
stolenmerch
I was always under the impression that Lloyd Dunn coined the term.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Dunn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Dunn)

------
akaktsn
I’d be curious if there is someone designing art or tech in this style.

~~~
egypturnash
Zillions of people. Usually it gets called steampunk (18xx) or dieselpunk
(193x-194x). 195x-6x futurism usually ends up going very Googie. And we’re
starting to see 70s/80s retrofuturism, mostly I’d say the word associated with
that is vaporwave.

More art than actual tech, and most of the tech is one-off hand-built stuff.

~~~
Swizec
Would cyberpunk count as 90s retrofuturism? Or have we decided it hits too
close to home for present times?

~~~
irscott
Nah cyberpunk is it's own thing and the aesthetic way predates the 90s.

------
avindroth
I think of Bioshock when I see that word

~~~
erlapso
Agreed, as in: Steampunk is actually a form of retrofuturism

~~~
pizzicato
The Wikipedia article does describe steampunk as a high-profile example.

Also interesting to note the two non-distinct forms of retrofuturism: "the
future as seen from the past" and "the past as seen from the future".
Steampunk is an example of the latter.

~~~
aidenn0
Renditions of things described by Jules Verne could be considered both "the
future as seen from the past" and "Steampunk"

~~~
jbay808
Or working models of Babbage's machines!

------
throw_m239339
Time to read Jules Verne books again.

------
hawski
I see a new wave of futurism with solarpunk. I hope it will catch on.

------
bityard
See also: false nostalgia

------
tomphoolery
my favorite style of art!

------
paypalcust83
What then is the converse of retrofuturism where the present or future is
represented with a mix of obsolete technologies along with contemporary and/or
hypothetical future ones?

~~~
magicsmoke
A post-apocalypic present with ancient and highly advanced technologies
unearthed from ruins that humanity no longer has the skill to remake.
Miyazaki's Nausicaa comes to mind.

Or maybe a world where technology is futuristic but the societal structure is
from the past. Warhammer 40k, the Roman empire but in space.

~~~
_Microft
RPGs are often like that. Powerful items are never something like the
_optimized, advanced light sabre of performance_ but always something like the
_ancient rusty sword of the primordial elders_.

