Retrofuturism

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an early use of the term appears in a Bloomingdales advertisement in a 1983 issue of The New York Times. The ad talks of jewellery that is "silverized steel and sleek grey linked for a retro-futuristic look". In an example more related to retrofuturism as an exploration of past visions of the future, the term appears in the form of “retro-futurist” in a 1984 review of the film Brazil in The New Yorker.[3] Critic Pauline Kael writes, "[Terry Gilliam] presents a retro-futurist fantasy."[4]

Several websites have referenced a supposed 1967 book published by Pelican Books called Retro-Futurism by T. R. Hinchliffe as the origin of the term, but this account is unverified. There exist no records of this book or author.[5][upper-alpha 1]

Retrofuturism builds on ideas of futurism, but the latter term functions differently in several different contexts. In avant-garde artistic, literary and design circles, futurism is a long-standing and well established term. But in its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is "an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century 'golden age' that continued long into the 1960s' Space Age".[6]

Retrofuturism is first and foremost based on modern but changing notions of "the future". As Guffey notes, retrofuturism is "a recent neologism", but it "builds on futurists' fevered visions of space colonies with flying cars, robotic servants, and interstellar travel on display there; where futurists took their promise for granted, retro-futurism emerged as a more skeptical reaction to these dreams".[7] It took its current shape in the 1970s, a time when technology was rapidly changing. From the advent of the personal computer to the birth of the first test tube baby, this period was characterized by intense and rapid technological change. But many in the general public began to question whether applied science would achieve its earlier promise—that life would inevitably improve through technological progress. In the wake of the Vietnam War, environmental depredations, and the energy crisis, many commentators began to question the benefits of applied science. But they also wondered, sometimes in awe, sometimes in confusion, at the scientific positivism evinced by earlier generations. Retrofuturism "seeped into academic and popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s", inflecting George Lucas's Star Wars and the paintings of pop artist Kenny Scharf alike".[8] Surveying the optimistic futurism of the early twentieth century, the historians Joe Corn and Brian Horrigan remind us that retrofuturism is "a history of an idea, or a system of ideas—an ideology. The future, or course, does not exist except as an act of belief or imagination."[9]

Retrofuturism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.

The first trend, retrofuturism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.

The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mélange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend. In the movie Space Station 76 (2014), mankind has reached the stars, but clothes, technology, furnitures and above all social taboos are purposely highly reminiscent of the mid-1970s.

In practice, the two trends cannot be sharply distinguished, as they mutually contribute to similar visions. Retrofuturism of the first type is inevitably influenced by the scientific, technological, and social awareness of the present, and modern retrofuturistic creations are never simply copies of their pre-1960 inspirations; rather, they are given a new (often wry or ironic) twist by being seen from a modern perspective.

In the same way, futuristic retro owes much of its flavor to early science fiction (e.g. the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells), and in a quest for stylistic authenticity may continue to draw on writers and artists of the desired period.

Both retrofuturistic trends in themselves refer to no specific time. When a time period is supplied for a story, it might be a counterfactual present with unique technology; a fantastic version of the future; or an alternate past in which the imagined (fictitious or projected) inventions of the past were indeed real.

The import of retrofuturism has, in recent years, come under considerable discussion. Some, like the German architecture critic Niklas Maak, see retrofuturism as "nothing more than an aesthetic feedback loop recalling a lost belief in progress, the old images of the once radically new".[10] Bruce McCall calls retrofuturism a "faux nostalgia"—the nostalgia for a future that never happened.[11]

Although retrofuturism, due to the varying time-periods and futuristic visions to which it alludes, does not provide a unified thematic purpose or experience, a common thread is dissatisfaction or discomfort with the present, to which retrofuturism provides a nostalgic contrast.

A similar theme is dissatisfaction with the modern world itself. A world of high-speed air transport, computers, and space stations is (by any past standard) "futuristic"; yet the search for alternative and perhaps more promising futures suggests a feeling that the desired or expected future has failed to materialize. Retrofuturism suggests an alternative path, and in addition to pure nostalgia, may act as a reminder of older but now forgotten ideals. This dissatisfaction also manifests as political commentary in Retrofuturistic literature,[12] in which visionary nostalgia is paradoxically linked to a utopian future modelled after conservative values[13] as seen in the example of Fox News' use of BioShock's aesthetic in a 2014 broadcast.[14][15]

Retrofuturism also implies a reevaluation of technology. Unlike the total rejection of post-medieval technology found in most fantasy genres, or the embrace of any and all possible technologies found in some science-fiction, retrofuturism calls for a human-scale, largely comprehensible technology, amenable to tinkering and less opaque than modern black-box technology.

Retrofuturism is not universally optimistic, and when its points of reference touch on gloomy periods like World War II, or the paranoia of the Cold War, it may itself become bleak and dystopian. In such cases, the alternative reality inspires fear, not hope, though it may still be coupled with nostalgia for a world of greater moral as well as mechanical transparency.

• Anachronism – Chronological inconsistency
• Atomic Age – Period of history (1945–present)
• Bonk Business
• Cyberpunk and cyberpunk derivatives
• Dieselpunk – Retrofuturistic science fiction subgenre inspired by early-to-mid 20th-century diesel-based technology
• Futurama (New York World's Fair)
• The Jetsons – American animated sitcom
• List of stories set in a future now past
• Neo-futurism – Late-20th- to early-21st-century movement in the arts, design, and architecture
• Raygun Gothic
• Retrotronics – The making of electric circuits or appliances using older electric components
• Retro-style automobile
• Steampunk – Science fiction genre inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery

• Brosterman, Norman. Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth Century Future. ISBN 0-8109-2939-2.
• Corn, Joseph J.; Brian Horrigan; Katherine Chambers (1996). Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. JHU Press. ISBN 0-8018-5399-0.
• Canto, Christophe; Odile Faliu (1993). The History of the Future: Images of the 21st Century. Flammarion. ISBN 2-08-013544-9.
• Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003). Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-1847-7.
• Heimann, Jim (2002). Future Perfect. Köln, London: Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-1566-7.
• Hodge, Brooke (2002). Retrofuturism: The Car Design of J Mays. Museum of Contemporary Art. ISBN 0-7893-0822-3.
• Onosko, Tim (1979). Wasn't the Future Wonderful?: A View of Trends and Technology From the 1930s. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-47551-6.
• Sheckley, Robert (1978). Futuropolis: Impossible Cities of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: A&W Visual Library. ISBN 0-89104-123-0.
• Wilson, Daniel H.; Richard Horne (2007). Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 1-59691-136-0.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Retrofuturism.

Look up retro future in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• The wonder city you may live to see – 1950 as seen in 1925
• retro-futurismus.de – A German site showing numerous illustrations (click the names)
• /r/RetroFuturism – A Subreddit on the topic