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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals.

The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pictures that reveal something essential.

I’m hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. Apple TV’s “Silo” has a wonderful production design but it’s too claustrophobic to fulfill my wish.

“The Mote in God’s Eye” would be my pick if I could get any IP developed with this approach.

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Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.

Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.

One of my earliest serious fan sites I made. I forgot the name, might be able to pull it up on archive, but I had a section with the whole cast each with a "cylon suspicion meter" bar. Great memories.

> old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits

Reminds me of Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.

This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.

That would have been brilliant.

The “Foundation” we got has good moments and excellent production values, but it doesn’t seem to know or care exactly what the rules of its universe are. (I don’t like how Hari Seldon was apparently a font of semi-magical technology invented all at once and in secret…)

I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).

If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.

Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?

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