[…] as if it was ripped out straight from the movie. I really like this sort of aesthetic, and I wish we saw more of it in games and movies. The retro feeling wanes a bit as you progress and find yourself crawling […]

I realize I’m coming several months late to the conversation, but I’m a huge retro-science fiction fan so I thought I’d chime in. The genre that you’re calling “spacepunk” has already been referred to as “atompunk” and “raygun gothic”. The architectural style based off this is called “Googie” or “Populuxe”. This would be harking back to campy stuff from the 50s & 60s like the Jetsons, Forbidden Planet, Lost In Space, the original Star Trek, comic books like Buck Rogers and the Fantastic Four, as well as more serious stuff like George Orwell’s “1984”, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001” & Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”. There’s not a ton of examples of it like there are for steampunk and dieselpunk, but there’s a few: Tim Burton’s film “Mars Attacks”, Matt Groening’s cartoon “Futurama”, “The Fifth Element”, The Star Wars prequels, Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”, and the SyFy Channel’s series “Caprica” (the prequel to Battlestar Galactica).

I like it and think im the only one to get the style you mean. Its nothing like steampunk or fallout. Its more old school B-movie sci-fi. Id love to see a TV series made :)

@ Liudvikas:

True, it wouldn’t really be much SF. More like retro space fantasy. :P

@ Alphast:

Yes, sort of. I think we could do much more retro on the technology though. Gattaca had all these high fidelity screens, holograms, DNA scanners. I want punch cards and tiny screens with ginormous cathode ray tubes in the back .:)

@ copperfish:

Yes! This! Can we have this?

I love the idea of huge power packs and batteries for everything. Here is your personal communicator – and here is the cartwheel with the battery. Make sure you pull the parking break lever when you leave it on an incline – it’s quite heavy. Someone could get hurt.

Not steam-punk, more electro-mechanical punk…..

I think it is better to extrapolate the 1950’s vision for the future but tweaking it with what we know today. Something like all the advances we have, but assume no miniaturisation and no machine to machine networking.

So no personal computers, but wireless chunky headsets exist for person to person and person to computer interaction. Something like the current cellphone system and a voice driven internet. “Operator, please search for information on….” Operators on terminals search for data and interact with users. People driven internet with large centralised data stores and computers.

Sticking with the centralised thought…

Yes, lasers, but imagine large nuclear powered tanks with cables leading to personal laser guns i.e. 1 tank per 6 troops.

@ Dr Azrael Tod I also though of Fallout when I pictured this….

I think Luke meant “Welcome to Gattaca”. It fits the genre quite well.

@Liudvikas The mind boggles.

sky captain: world of tomorrow; rocketeer; big guy & rusty the robot; brazil (no mention of space travel, but…); just a few… I dig the notion, though… It’d be swell to see / read more like it.

No way, bad idea.
I cant believe words retro and sci-fi be in the same sentence.
Oh shit, I used them in the same sentence.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

No, not at all. Fallout is post-apocalyptic. What I’m talking about is this sort of setting but without some cataclysm but with space travel, flying cars, etc…

But yeah, Fallout is close.