When we see the future through the eyes of the past, we can tap into a sense of wonder that’s hard to come by in 2023.
Imagine for a moment that you live in the early 20th century. It is an era of unprecedented change and technological advancement. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radio, and other innovations have reshaped your every day life. If you were to look to the future, you would probably think that the pace of change would continue unabated. From your vantage point, it would be reasonable to assume that flying cars, interstellar travel, and robots would be commonplace in just a few decades.
We can’t visit the future, but we can imagine it. And because our imaginations are limited, the way we picture the future often bears a striking similarity to our present. Now, this usually goes completely unnoticed at the time. A novel or film can feel groundbreaking and wildly futuristic to contemporary audiences and hopelessly dated a generation later. If you look back at the pulp era of science fiction, you’ll find stories that feature space travel, but not computers as we know them today. The design and language of the time feels like a throwback to us, but when it was written, it was cutting-edge.
Take Metropolis, a German Expressionist silent film released in 1927. The film imagines a dystopian future where rich industrialists oppress the workers who make their paradise possible. It’s a timeless theme—and yet today, it’s so obviously tied to when it was made, down to the subtlest Art Deco detail.
What makes retrofuturism so much fun is that is does this intentionally. It draws on the past—its aesthetics, its values, its cultural norms—to tell modern stories that feel old. The most famous example is steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction that sets its tales against the backdrop of the Victorian Era. As time marches on, retrofuturism gets more and more material to work with. There’s also dieselpunk (one of my personal favorites), which borrows liberally from the 1930s and ’40s. You could also argue cyberpunk is quickly becoming retrofuturist, as those stories continue to be tied to the ethos of the 1980s and early ’90s. Someday, maybe 50 or 100 years from now, a science fiction author with a love of history will set one of their stories in the long-ago Smartphone Age.
What I love about retrofuturism is two-fold. I appreciate the quality of escapism and absurdity inherent in steam-powered starships and jetpacks and ray guns. When I dive into a story with a retrofuturistic bent, like the movie Gattaca, with its fedoras and streamlined cars and film noir shadows and invasive genetic screenings, I know I’m going to be swept away into a world that is utterly familiar and yet starkly different than the real world. It frees you from reality and lets you ask big “what if” questions that can be another way to get at fundamental truths about our world.
I also like the way it comments on nostalgia. The best retrofuturist tales don’t make fun of the past for getting the future wrong, but rather they celebrate the imaginative ways our forebears tried to predict what was coming. It’s a form of nostalgia that subverts our preconceived notions about the past, an exercise in empathy that invites us to step into their shoes, squint into that bright light on the horizon, and try to make out the blurry shapes in the distance. When we borrow from their worlds in our futuristic visions, we’re also borrowing their sense of wonder at the monumental changes that must’ve felt like they just around the corner.
I’ve always had a soft spot for this kind of storytelling and a love for richly detailed visions of the future as imagined through the lens of the past. That’s probably why, when I was searching for an escape from reality during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote an audio drama script with strong retrofuturist influences.
The Adventures of Captain Radio is a show-within-a-show, a pulpy sci-fi adventure radio drama that exists in a world where humans landed on the Moon in 1930 and flying cars are a popular way to commute. I had a lot of fun writing both the over-the-top retro-technobabble and the commercials for products like a home computer small enough to fit in your basement. The second and third seasons, which I’ve written but which we haven’t recorded yet, go further, incorporating news bulletins that give the audience more insight into this alternate world where Amelia Earheart is a famous astronaut instead of a famous aviator.
I think we can learn a lot from retrofuturism and from the writers who came before us. When so much science fiction is filled with bleak dystopian futures, retrofuturism reminds us not to take our predictions too seriously, because we will be proven wrong in the end. And it offers us a glimmer of hope that we, too, can dare to imagine futures brimming with astonishment at the wonders humanity is capable of.
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Jonny Eberle is a writer, podcaster, and storyteller with a penchant for old movies and vintage aesthetics. He lives in Tacoma, WA with his family, a dog, and three adorable typewriters. His writing has been published in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can listen to his audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, and his writing podcast, Dispatches with Jonny Eberle, wherever you enjoy podcasts.
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