The Future of the Past
In Strange Stars, I mentioned how I saw the stylings of this particular future as harkening back to the science fiction of previous decades. I imagine spaceships like in seventies films, seventies and eighties book covers and comics books, particularly the Terran Trade Authority books.
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David Lewis Johnson’s art for Strange Stars and Chris Foss’s designs |
The groovy fashions of late sixties and seventies sci-fi book cover art, the euro-sensibilities of Heavy Metal, and disco-era comic book sci-fi in the U.S. inform how I view the fashion and material culture. Sure they’re silly in a lot of ways–but often so are clothes from real historical eras to modern sensibilities.
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Waclaw Wysocki’s Instrumentality Spy and Jessica from Logan’s Run |
Now as anyone who has read Strange Stars or my blog posts on it knows, its not retro-sci-fi, overall. It’s just that I wanted to go beyond the current 21st future aesthetic: a lot of darkness, sleek suits, and electric blue holograms, etc. I’m certainly not immune to recent influences, but I feel like those things get too familiar. The future needs to seem exotic and going back to the past is a way to restore some of that exoticism. At least it reminds me (and maybe other around my age) of a time where the future looked different, and we were young enough to be encountering these images and the ideas behind them for the first time.