the retrofuturism of now
Jun. 21st, 2010 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraToday at work I was pondering steampunk. (While making preservation boxes/wrappers for old books. It works in my head, all right?) On the Politics of Steampunk panel at WisCon, there were several different descriptions of what exactly steampunk is.
Someone (I'd have to go back to my notes to figure out who) said it was "retrofuturism". That word stuck in my head for a while, and something wiggled loose today.
Namely: what does steampunk do, what is steampunk, that isn't in Wells and Verne? What is steampunk, qua retrofuturism? What does retrofuturism mean? What does it mean in this context?
And: okay, so say that we have some ideas of what steampunk is, qua retrofuturism. How do we apply that to today? If there were a future society, can we postulate what kind of retrofurutistic SF they would write about our world today, and what would that look like?
Then when I got home Tordotcom had a post about Alex Varanese's Alt/1977. To me, this exemplifies some things I was thinking about (eliding a few decades into each other, distilling the essence of what 'we' like or see ourselves in from it, romanticization to a certain extent), but I'm sure there are lots of ways that people could take this concept. And, of course, this has an entirely different stated intent--but it's somewhere to start with imagining it.
Someone (I'd have to go back to my notes to figure out who) said it was "retrofuturism". That word stuck in my head for a while, and something wiggled loose today.
Namely: what does steampunk do, what is steampunk, that isn't in Wells and Verne? What is steampunk, qua retrofuturism? What does retrofuturism mean? What does it mean in this context?
And: okay, so say that we have some ideas of what steampunk is, qua retrofuturism. How do we apply that to today? If there were a future society, can we postulate what kind of retrofurutistic SF they would write about our world today, and what would that look like?
Then when I got home Tordotcom had a post about Alex Varanese's Alt/1977. To me, this exemplifies some things I was thinking about (eliding a few decades into each other, distilling the essence of what 'we' like or see ourselves in from it, romanticization to a certain extent), but I'm sure there are lots of ways that people could take this concept. And, of course, this has an entirely different stated intent--but it's somewhere to start with imagining it.