It feels like all we're left with is retro-futurism to get our fix.
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.
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.
For someone born in the 50s , reality caught up with predictions pretty fast, even overtaking them
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.
In the west...
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...
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.
-------
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.
---------
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.
It has some very good episodes and works today as retro-future. The aesthetics and the mood are nice.
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.
The Expanse
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 begins, though. love the movie otherwise