After the horrific events of World War II, people wanted a positive view of the future; an escape from what we had just gone through. And there was fantastic progress in the world with the dawn of the nuclear age, space age, and computer age. Hence all the retro-futurism media of those following decades.

It's now been a generation since and while the world is filled with tragedy, there has been no apocalyptic scale war in most living persons' memory. People don't need to escape to a fantasy world where the future is bright; we live in a bright future already. So we see more media around dark futures, new wars, and apocalypses; because those are fantasies in the minds of the modern viewers.

That's overall a good thing, though yes we miss out on a lot of that optimistic-futuristic creativity of the past.

I don't agree with this.

Many writers in the 80s would still have been too young to remember WW2 (some might have even been born after it entirely) and there are still plenty of sci-fi stories and scripts being written which are based in the future.

I think the explanation is a simpler one: writers didn't know any better. In the 50s through to 80s exaggerated predictions were made based on observations of the way tech was advancing at that time (much of that kind of tech was new). However after people grew up and realised those predictions were vastly over optimistic they would then go on to set their science fiction stories at a more pragmatic date in the future. Sometimes writers these days don't even specify a date and I suspect that's intentional to avoid jokes about it's "predictions".

Simply put: Writers these days are just more aware of how quickly dates change and how long their content remains in the cultural conciousness.

It's also worth baring in mind that a lot of the time these kinds of stories are "alt universe" type stuff. ie based on some theoretically similar universe to ours as well as x number of years in the future.

> However after people grew up and realised those predictions were vastly over optimistic

For someone born in the 50s , reality caught up with predictions pretty fast, even overtaking them

> After the horrific events of World War II, people wanted a positive view of the future; an escape from what we had just gone through

A ton of the sci-fi from after WWII has cold-war undertones, nuclear fallout / post-apocalyptic, block politics, space race between US/USSR, etc. Cyber punk started at the end of the Cold War, when the total nuclear war risk was less present.

Blade Runner was not at all an optimistic view of the future, though.

Hi fpgaminer, an related comment this is.

I read your comments about 3 months ago on a FORTH post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20865684

And you mentioned that you are developing a game that completely emulate C64 interface and players have to write programs to control the starship through it.

THis is very interesting idea (I'm actually playing an elevator emulator which has the same idea), and I'm wondering if you have a homepage or something?

Thanks in advance! Wish we could see some serious programming games in the future. Whenever I play System Shock or Alien Isolation I think that the hacking part could be more interesting by actually asking the player to do some simple programming...

> there has been no apocalyptic scale war in most living persons' memory

In the west...

blade runner is a dystopia though

I actually liked the 2000s-era anime Eden of the East for imagining the world 1-years into the future.

Eden of the East takes place on November 2010, but the air date was November 2009. The "near-term future" allowed for futurism thoughts.

And before you hate on Eden of the East... remember that Kenji Kamiyama (its director) was also the director to Ghost in a Shell: Stand alone complex. Kenji is a veteran of the Sci-Fi anime genre.

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I think "near term future" is cooler anyway. Stargate SG-1, back in the 90s, was contemporary but invoked futurism occassionally.

"Far future" stories of the 70s are either the Jetsons or Star Trek. Star Trek frankly is a fantasy series with a venier of sci-fi (filled with Elves, and Orcs... I mean Vulcan, and Klingon)... while the Jetsons shows how out-of-date the future can be in times of actual progress.

"Near Term future" ages more gracefully: its reminiscent of the era it was built in (ex: Stargate SG-1 still feels 90s), but still has enough "future optimism" to excite audiences during their air date.

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Now that I think of it... the "Futuristic" stories of the 2010s decade was "The Avengers". Heli-carriers, Vibranium, Space-tech, Iron-man suits, Sentient AIs (two of them! Vision and Ultron) and even time-travel. You've got it all.

Plenty of optimistic "futurism". But instead of calling it the future, we're so optimistic these days that we pretend that these things are happening in the now.

Mark Fisher on the slow cancellation of the future https://youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ

RIP and thank you for referencing him.

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is “up there” with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death when it comes to why I despair about the trajectory of modern society.

Black Mirror is pretty good, but tends to be more grounded in reality than wild imaginations from the 80s. Whether or not this makes them more accurate is to be seen :)

I think 'Her' is a very great sci-fi view of future tech, especially how they use voice as the primary interface

Let’s not forget Ex Machina.

Max Headroom TV-movie and the series, not the show is surprisingly good.

It has some very good episodes and works today as retro-future. The aesthetics and the mood are nice.

I think there are plenty of modern interpretations, although it is possible they just don’t exist anymore in mainstream cinema.

The movie market itself has changed greatly from the 70s and 80s. There was no such thing as video streaming and the home video market was in its infancy at best. If you wanted to watch a movie at that time you probably had to go to a theater or maybe wait for a TV airing.

Blade Runner was considered a financial flop when it released, and even its (mostly superior) nostalgia-fueled sequel failed to do much more than break even.

These kinds of thought provoking films don’t appeal to a mainstream audience: to fill a modern theater, you have to provide something to the specific kind of audience that wouldn’t rather just watch a 10 part series at home.

So it’s either a mass-appeal big budget thriller with merchandising potential, or a low budget low risk movie.

Showing “the future” on screen isn’t usually cheap, either. And you can’t do a lot of world building in 2 hours.

Paolo Bacigalupi's biopunk books (eg The Windup Girl) seem a lot like the future we're headed towards.

Minority Report was fairly 'near future' in the grand scheme of things, but I thought its vision of the future was quite well conceived (everything aside from the pre-cog fantasy aspect of course).

Our visions of the future are filled with apocalyptic zombie outcomes.

> Are there any contemporary visions of the future that are as forward thinking as the cyberpunk universe imagined in the 80s?

The Expanse

Well, if you like drug taking communists in space, complete with snarky drones, there is always the Culture....

I really hope the Amazon version of Consider Phlebas works out OK, even though its protagonist is fighting against the statistically demonstrated good guys.

It's funny that you say that as the Culture series is the only thing that's scratched this itch for me in decades. Highly recommended.

The Expanse is nearly cyberpunk (without the cyber) in space. Spacepunk? Astropunk?

more like a "space adventure". like Star wars, but realistic. Not particularly punk or lowlife, but at least it isn't another the-world-is-ending saga

You're thinking of space opera, and I agree the Expanse isn't very 'punk, but it does show the impoverished and those on the fringe of society (ice haulers), as well as corporate power (rent-a-cop detectives). It's like a hard sci-fi version of Game of Thrones, with its ensemble cast of viewpoint characters and otherworldly threat. Perhaps it's more like space post-cyberpunk.

to me the cyberpunk elements in expanse look really like props existing as homage to cyber scifi - they don't have an active role in the movie. It centers on the adventures of the protagonists confronting central power, heads of state and planets etc. blade runner was just a retired policeman pursuing the lowest of the low. very different points of view

The belters are the lowlifes and marginalized of the punk-ish scifi, working in hazardous conditions, and used and discarded by the powers of the universe. I think that's where The Expanse does better. The other more "space adventure" plot points are enjoyable, but more run of the mill.

I don't know, but I'd love to see some. Every time I see a movie set on an intact Earth well in to the future it's a bit frustrating they don't even try to address how we fixed climate breakdown.

I liked how "The Expanse" handled this, portraying New York City as still intact, but surrounded by dikes to protect it from the risen sea level.

Interstellar?

another end-of-the-world movie (they all are nowadays). Fatalist, not cyberpunk or dystopian

He saves the world by transmitting data to his daughter who they figures out how to solve the problem, he then meets his old daughter who instructs him to go live with his new woman on a planet together. It doesn't end fatalist.

> It doesn't end fatalist.

it begins, though. love the movie otherwise

I feel like The Expanse is a more accurate vision of the future, at least as space exploration is concerned, than Star Trek.

Especially as then Orwell's "1984" was around the corner.