New blog: Paleo-future

"A look into the future that never was" (see Blogs on the right too). Organized by decade, from 1870's to 1990's (the 2000's, presumably, not being that paleo, yet), peaks in the 1960's. Sample, from 1957:

DRIVERLESS CAR OF THE FUTURE

The "About Me" entry links to the Wikipedia entry on "Retro-futurism": "... retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology." More:

Retro-futurism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.

The first trend, retro-futurism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.

The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mélange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend.

In practice, the two trends cannot be sharply distinguished, as they mutually contribute to similar visions.