Whatever happened to the worlds of tomorrow?
But what happens to yesterday’s visions of tomorrow?
Once they have fallen from popular consciousness, do we dwell on them, and is there any value in that?
In the creative arts, retrofuturism is that dwelling—either on the future as seen from the past, or on the past as seen from the future.
The former approach draws from the imagined futures of a particular period—depicted in genuine projections or science fiction. These futuristic visions are refurbished for the present, offering counterfactual possibilities of the future. Examples include Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, which stylized itself after what Americans in the ’60s thought the future would look like. The latter approach is essentially the inverse, capitalizing on the aesthetics of retro styles and then introducing modern or futuristic technologies to blend past, present, and future. The “stone age” set, The Flintstones, with its automobiles made out of stone and baby mammoths used as vacuum cleaners, is the perhaps the first example that comes to mind for many, but this form of retrofuturism is far more popular. The period presented in either approach could be an alternate future in which imagined inventions were real or, ironically, a fantastic version of the past and present.
Long before we found the words for it, retrofuturism as a clear concept had been gestating for decades, though it existed in some form or another throughout human history. In early 20th century Italy, its ideological predecessor, Futurism, came together as industrialization and urbanization transformed man’s relationship with the world. Fetishizing modern developments such as planes and cars—as well as emphasizing values such as speed, technology, and youth—Futurism came to be popularly understood as an early-twentieth-century optimism that continued well into the Space Age of the 1960s. Ironically, even though Italian Futurism glorified modernity, aiming to liberate Italy from its past, its fixation with the future transformed into a lingering fascination with our past’s visions of it. With planes crossing oceans and rockets racing into space, the throttles of progress were pushed even harder as the century sped on. Reflecting on this acceleration in 1920, poet Ezra Pound wrote, “The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace.” It seemed that Futurism was that image—our anticipation of what was to come. However, as it never came to pass, retrofuturism is our way of collectively gathering that anticipation.
Emerging in the 1970s, an era of rapid technological advancements, retrofuturism initially was a skeptical reaction to the Futurist’s visions of flying cars and ray guns. In light of the environmental and energy crises (and the seemingly never-ending war in Vietnam) the public began questioning whether life would inevitably improve through technological progress. Commentators began to look back at the scientific positivism of earlier generations, either in awe or confusion. That sentiment inevitably reached the academic and popular culture of the ’60s and ’70s, so much so that it is not uncommon for modern philosophers to condemn retrofuturism as a symptom of our inability to envision an original future for ourselves.
On a grander scale, it is said that in the post-Soviet world, “the dimension of the future has disappeared,” as British theorist Mark Fisher once put it, and he went so far as to claim that “we’re marooned, we’re trapped in the twentieth century, still.” Though he was not referring to retrofuturism per se, it has been viewed as a microcosm of Fischer’s concern, verifying his ideas on capitalist realism. However, this fixation on the nostalgia “inherent” in retrofuturism is peculiar, as retrofuturism suggests alternative paths for humanity by allowing us to explore the past, present, and future outside of our timeline. Doing so allows us to explore ideas in new settings that would otherwise be impossible if they were to be carried out within the confines of our world. Set in an alternate 1960s, Ken Levine’s Bioshock imagines an underwater utopia named Rapture based on what the objectivist movement believed would be an ideal society. This opened up a new avenue to critique objectivism than would otherwise be afforded by the real world or projections of the future set after the 20th-century milieu that inspired objectivism’s founder, Ayn Rand.
Going beyond its immediate objective, retrofuturism is not only a fruitful pursuit but a necessary prelude to envisioning the original futures these philosophers claim to have disappeared. Post-cyberpunk was envisioned as the antithesis to cyberpunk, a genre that is now considered retrofuturistic, and back when it was treated as a serious projection, cyberpunk itself had been conceived of as the antithesis of the then-dated Futurism of the ’50s and ’60s.
Every decade experiences waves of nostalgia; historically speaking, what we are experiencing is nothing new. This is a natural part of the intellectual cycles of art and philosophy. Only by ruminating on our pasts are we able to move forward, and retrofuturism is the perfect vehicle for that. Since time immemorial, humanity has been grappling with change, and retrofuturism allows us to reevaluate our relationship with transformative technology in familiar fictional settings. In stark contrast to the total rejection of post-medieval technology prevalent in fantasy and its various subgenres, retrofuturism is far more considerate when evaluating existing and imagined technologies, offering a refreshingly nuanced portrayal of it that often tends to be found in futuristic science fiction but without its isolating and overwhelming alienness. This, in addition to retrofuturism’s ability to host atypical protagonists in recognizable period-specific settings, allows writers to recount and recontextualize our pasts in novel and complex ways, offering answers only speculative fiction is capable of giving. Alan Moore’s serial comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen extensively uses retrofuturistic elements from steampunk to ray gun gothic in its ambitious attempt to deconstruct the entire corpus of Western art. Using retrofuturism to create an alternate history for the world, he can offer a holistic critique of Western art by shining a light on the unsavory implications of revered works, as well as depicting the settings and characters in a more realistic fashion.
Though it could fall into kitsch, optimistic retrofuturism, in contrast, is uniquely capable of evoking an era when the future was bright, reminding us of what we were and what we thought we could achieve. Unlike the dated art of the ’50s and ’60s that is no longer capable of connecting with the masses as a result of succumbing to its heavy censorship and tired tropes, retrofuturistic art drawing from this period is able to inspire in us the optimism of the atomic age needed to vision a brighter future for humanity. It is no surprise then that the fledgling solarpunk movement is refreshingly reminiscent of the atomic age and its hopefulness. Taking inspiration from that era’s ethos (as well as its stylistic elements) coupled with a refurbishing of age-old Arcadian utopias and indigenous practices with green tech, solarpunk draws on retrofuturistic movements to forge a new vision for humanity inspired by the past, present, and future.
Far from the creative dead end that its critics try to paint it as, retrofuturism is one of the most complex and versatile approaches to speculative fiction. Considering the multiplicity of the periods, locations, and futuristic visions that writers can work with, the possibilities of retrofutures are limitless. It seems that even if we might be done with these futures, these futures are definitely not done with us.
