Retrofuturism 26: A Look Back at the 2010s

 

I have a long-running series on this blog which relates past styles to future sensibilities. It is interesting to see what survives these days for the sake of stylistic nostalgia, past any functional or practical requirements.

Sometimes, the historical stylistic element refers to an old technology, indicating a mental and emotional human lag in the face of exponential innovation.

Today's superb example came from Substack: the 981 Retro Express Wireless, Mechanical Gaming Vintage Typewriter Keyboard (hat tip: Ozarklore). On embarking upon the writing of this post, I was shocked to find that the 'Retrofuturism' series proper hasn't been updated here since 2013. Looking back, I see that the best posts relating to this topic confirm that retro-futurism was a 2010s' trend. It appears that the period from the late 2010s through 2022 dampened historical curiosity in relation to technology. This could be due to intensified political debates and the global pandemic, which dominated popular attention for seven years.

Here are some of my old posts highlighting retro-futuristic 2010s' projects which either did not survive into the 2020s, or may have borne fruit, but their signals got lost in the noise from the early part of this decade. For example, the incredible video game, Gorgoa, demonstrates that even in accelerated environments, real human accomplishments still take years to complete. Perhaps we can take heart in that:

•  The Next Tetris: Gorgoa (13 January 2013): an amazing-looking retro-futuristic game that won several awards in 2018 after its 2017 launch.
• Retrofuturism 23: Baby Boomers and Alien Astronauts (10 January 2013): a retrospective on 1960s' and 1970s' spiritual esoteric spiritualism as projected upon space exploration. With Gigi Young's series on Mars Mysteries on Youtube, we see that interest in this topic is still going strong. My work on my new novel serial, Vampire Daddy, falls in the same category (shameless plug). Vampire Daddy not only draws on my earlier discussions of how space exploration relates to religious, spiritual and esoteric topics, but it also refers to other retro-futuristic themes I discussed, such as the Slavonic Gothic, Russian Space Art, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books from the first decade of the 20th century. 

 

The Warlords of Mars (1914). Source: JW Knott Books. 

• Shameless plug, continued: as a tribute to Burroughs, I recently did an AI rendering of my characters, Lexi and Primeva, in the style of John Carter and Dejah Thorus, echoing the classic Barsoom renderings of  the 1910s, with hints of later 1960s' and 1970s' interpretations, now reworked again in the 2010s and 2020s. Of course, many others have paid homage to Burroughs. Marv Wolfman - whose work I have covered extensively here - wrote a Marvel comic from 1977 to 1979 which expanded on Burroughs' work. There were also a couple of series from Dark Horse and notable Warlord of Mars series from Dynamite, which sparked a lawsuit from the Burroughs' estate. Disney released a troubled adaptation, John Carter, in 2012. Comic Book Treasury put it best, that Burroughs' Barsoom series is "one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy tales of the 20th Century." You can read Burroughs' Mars books here. Librivox recordings are here and here. The Encyclopedia Barsoomia Wiki is here.

 

Lexi and Primeva. Source: My own prompting, on Dall-e. 

Other highlights from my 'Retrofuturism' series (I clearly had trouble deciding on whether or not to hyphenate the term): 

• Retrofuturism 19: Last Master of a Martial Art Reborn (16 November 2011): the 17th century Sikh martial art of Shastar Vidya (ਸ਼ਸਤਰ-ਵਿੱਦਿਆ), which frightened the British imperial authorities so much that they banned it, survives in akharas (training gymnasiums) and the tradition is still discussed on the Web.
• Five Fabulous Web Comics You Shouldn't Miss (28 October 2010): sadly, all of these great Web comics are no longer running. These projects all died before or during covid. Web comics evidently were enterprises of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which peaked by the 2010s: Bill Walko's The Hero Busine$$ (ended 2023); Jon Rosenberg's Scenes from a Metaverse (ended 2021); Kit Roebuck's (aka Adam Reed's) Nine Planets without Intelligent Life (ended 2025); Larry Latham's Lovecraft is Missing (ended 2014); Jesse Recklaw's Slow Wave (ended 2012). And we definitely should never forget the fantastic Tozo - The Public Servant, from David O'Connell (since 2018, the main website has belonged to a gambling site, but there are vestiges of O'Connell's work at that URL on the subpages).

In 2023, Chris Yeh predicted on Linked In that AI would lead to a "Cambrian explosion" of online comics and graphic novels. Instead, artistic and literary communities launched into painful debates over how and when to justify AI usage in the creative arts. As a result, the Cambrian explosion didn't happen.

The appetite for the past is still there as we collide with the future. But is it legitimate to ape the past with a technology that radically erases that past? My friend C. recently told me that 'Throwback Thursdays' was created by AI developers to encourage people to post photographs from the pre-Internet era to train artificial intelligences. We are on the other side of a watershed moment.

Retro-futurism in the last decade recalled craftsmanship, popular tastes, cultural memories, and artistic traditions like long-form content writing, print graphics and illustration. The trend was part of a brief flowering of purely- or mainly-human creative activities, ironically expressed through technologically-enabled media. That could only really be done in the 2010s, when human creative practices overlapped nearly exactly with forms of technology which were just advanced enough to channel human outputs globally. But technology at that point did not yet surpass, erase, overwhelm or supersede the human. Now it potentially does.

The retro-futuristic trend was part of the 2010s' last gasp of purely human creativity in the pre-AI age. Will AI revive retro-futurism above its 2010s' heights? Or will this peculiar form of techno-cultural nostalgia become a badge of anti-AI sentiment? Perhaps AI will bring us to some state of compromise between the purely human and pure machine. Only time will tell.

See all my posts on Retro-Futurism. Also here.

Mars Exploration Sci-Fi Cover Art

レッド・プラネット, Red Planet (1985). By Robert A. Heinlein.

Via Lee Hamilton's blog, here is a link to an amazing collection of international book covers for sci-fi novels that deal with Mars exploration.

Anniversaries: Remembering H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds. Cover by Frank. R. Paul.

The blog Dark Dorset has an excellent retrospective (here) on H. G. Wells to commemorate the anniversary of his death on August 13, 1946. Known as the 'father of science fiction,' Wells's influence on authors like Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs is well known. Perhaps the best rendition of his famous 1897 story about a Martians invasion, War of the Worlds, is Orson Welles's 1938 Mercury Theatre On the Air radio production, which you can listen to here (part 1, further parts play automatically on youtube). You can read H. G. Wells's original story here and the Mercury broadcast script here. There is a resource site on the story and its adaptations here.

This production was so realistic that it caused mass panic in the United States. Many people fled their homes and police switchboards were swamped with inquiries. Wiki quotes Richard Hand: "some six million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were 'genuinely frightened.'" Wiki: "Many listeners were apparently confused. It must be noted that the confusion cannot be credited entirely to naïveté. Though many of the actors' voices should have been recognizable from other radio shows, nothing like The War of the Worlds broadcast had been attempted in the United States, so listeners were accustomed to accepting newsflashes as reliable. The problem is that the working script had only three statements concerning the fictional nature of the program: at the beginning, at 40 minutes, and at the end. In fact, the warning at the 40-minute mark is the only one after the actors start speaking in character, and before Welles breaks character at the end."

New York Times headline: "Radio Listeners in Panic." October 31, 1938.

Welles had to apologize. Of course the power of the production stemmed from H. G. Wells's powerful descriptions of growing disaster that were embedded in the radio script.

Orson Welles's apology, October 31, 1938.

I have not confirmed this, but I recall reading that legislation was subsequently passed so that dramatizations of fictional disasters always must have a repeated tagline indicating that they are fictional. The obligatory confirmation that a real-seeming drama is fictional was cleverly used in the opening of 1999's Blair Witch Project, which initially claimed to be a true story: "I'm just telling a scary story - but it's not true."  The character Heather replies: "It's not true."  The reverse psychology initially made the audience think that the story was true.  We can trace this 100-year history of the blurring between truth and fiction, starting with H. G. Wells.

Retro-Futurism 2: Revisiting a Fantasy of the Red Planet

Warlord of Mars #1 (2010). Cover by Jusco. © Dynamite Entertainment.

Broken Frontier reported on July 19 that Dynamite Entertainment would be publishing an expansion of classic Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars.  The new series, out in October, will be called Warlord of Mars.  This series continues a current trend which revives the styles, ideas and culture from the long turn of the nineteenth century, roughly the period 1870 to 1930, and jumps headlong into the future.  Prehistoric, Medieval, Romantic and Gothic themes of pulp fiction fantasy dove-tail neatly with current real debates on Mars exploration.

Retro-Futurism 1: The Legendary Hallucinations by William Stout

One page from Hallucinations. © William Stout (2006).

Welcome to a new dimension of Retro-Futurism.  On July 15th, a remarkable book of illustrations entitled Hallucinations came out by William Stout.  The Beat just reported that Flesk Publications, which published this book, will have a table at the upcoming San Diego comics convention.  The book blurb: "the multi-award-winning artist presents illustrations that capture the very essence of the good folk and odd creatures who populate the dark woods and sun-filled glades of Aesop’s Fables, who wander the wonder-filled roads of the Land of Oz or who tread the blood-red soil of the planet called Barsoom, which we know as John Carter’s Mars."