The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. The Museum of Hoaxes. What is retro futurism? I'm definitely of the 'born too soon" generation! Punk-punk? You've left out the original [genre]punk — cyberpunk, William Gibson's baby. It's a more recent 'retro-future', recent enough that you might even recognize it as serious or hard SF. But it's still technically retrofuturism when Johnny Mnemonic runs around with a flash drive in his brain, and 'jacks in' to the 'matrix'. Burning Chrome was certainly from a time when 'the public was actively engaged in a discussion about what it would be like to live in a future utterly transformed by science and technology' — they were just talking about the Information Revolution rather than the Industrial Revolution. Cyberpunk has just held up better than other retro-futures because, for one, it's younger (not so retro), and for another, we've actively looked to the fiction to find words to describe our new reality.
So many of us at this site are, I think. Can We Go to Mars Without Going Crazy? | Space Flight. Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: As the snow swirls and temperatures plummet below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, explorer Frederick Cook, stuck with his men on an icebound ship, writes in his log: "We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience I know that this depression will increase. " Space station Mir, June 25, 1997: As an unmanned Russian supply ship from Earth draws toward him, commander Vasily Tsibliyev floats before a set of remote controls, trying desperately to guide the incoming module to a safe docking.
American astronaut Mike Foale and cosmonaut Sasha Lazutkin peer anxiously from portholes. Their commander is exhausted. His mental health has deteriorated under the stress of living in this bizarre miniature world for more than four months. "This is high-risk research," says Dinges. Principio Subantropico. Fermi's Paradox.