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| Angus McKie |
Back when I talked about the
Strange Stars "
Appendix N," I mentioned how I saw the stylings of this particular future as harkening back to previous decades. I imagine spaceships like in seventies films, seventies and eighties book covers and comics books, and particularly the Terran Trade Authority books.
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| Terran Trade Authority |
Also, the groovy fashions of late sixties and seventies 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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| Chaykin's Monark Starstalker |
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| Mike Grell's Charma |
Now as anyone who's been reading the posts knows, I'm not doing retro-sci-fi, overall. It's just that it seems like the there is a narrow range of how the future is viewed in any given era. Science fiction done today tends to look the same: 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.
8 comments:
It's reminds me of some of my favourite images of sci-fi and what caused my love of sci-fi and a touch of Charma would have been a bonus.
@Fran - I figured you'd lihe that.
Yeah, I kind of like that you're shaking things up a bit by looking at the future through the past a bit. Not that I dislike our contemporary sci-fi esthetics, but I do think digging up some older stuff does bring back a certain exoticism.
Oh, lord, I'd completely forgotten about the Terran Trade books. They're beautiful. Thanks for the memory spark.
@Chris - That was my feeling. Glad I'm not alone. :)
@Wasp - You're welcome.
I still have my copy of one of the TTA books I was given as a kid, and found a collected omnibus of all the series not to long ago.
I did the right thing of course and promptly handed it to the boy.
@Jez- Well....if you think that's the way to go..
If future-space doesn't look like the Buck Rogers tv show, I'm going to be devastated.
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