Retrofuturism is nostalgia for a future that never actually arrived
Flying cars, robot butlers and holidays among the stars were once confidently predicted. Retrofuturism takes those old forecasts and treats them as a style, blending vintage looks with imagined machines. Its critics call it fake nostalgia; its fans see a gentler, more tinkerable vision of technology than the sealed gadgets we actually got.
Futurism looks ahead to coming inventions; retrofuturism remembers how earlier generations looked ahead. The word joins the Latin prefix for backwards to the word future. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction traces a related term to 1981, when Trouser Press described a band as looking retro-futurist, and Pauline Kael used it in 1986 for Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. The mood took shape in the 1970s, when the Vietnam War, pollution and the energy crisis made many people doubt that science would automatically make life better.
Two currents run through it. One revives the forecasts made before 1960 in magazines and pulp fiction, updated with a wry modern twist into a picture of what might have been. The other starts from an old style of clothes, art or manners and bolts newer technology onto it. Steampunk is the best-known example of that second route, imagining steam-driven machines in a world resembling the period from the Regency to about 1914. The film Space Station 76 (2014) puts humanity in space while keeping furniture and taboos straight out of the mid-1970s.
Cyberpunk was the first of these offshoots to get its own name, in the literature of the early to mid-1980s by writers such as William Gibson and Pat Cadigan, usually set in a dystopian future. Steampunk followed in the late 1980s with a brighter tone, drawing on Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, with forerunners like Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone (1959). Dieselpunk, atompunk and Raygun Gothic each borrow the machinery of their own era.
The German critic Niklas Maak dismisses the whole thing as an aesthetic feedback loop, and Bruce McCall calls it faux nostalgia. Supporters point to a common thread of unease with the present and a preference for technology people can understand and repair. It can turn bleak when it draws on World War II or Cold War paranoia, and in the early 2020s it spread widely across architecture, transport and entertainment.
Source: Retrofuturism
