#(*pre-WWII. 2. typo) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fandom-space-princess · 8 months ago

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spent the morning tentatively constructing an essay in my head about the differences between Golden Age and New Wave science fiction and their conflicting approaches to the concepts of utopia and cultural perfection. and then realized that it's yet another thing I'm happier daydreaming about than actually writing. alas.

#old sci fi is a lifelong special interest for me and i am full of feelings about it #anyway the tldr of that essay would have been that the cold war transformed the broader cultural ideal in the west #of what a perfect future should look like and how it should serve the people living in it #there's this sense in a lot of the really popular scifi pre-WWI that the future is perfect bc as a species we've perfected ourselves #(*pre-WWII. 2. typo)#but coming into the 60s you notice that change dramatically #there's this odd background mixture of hope and dread. sort of a feeling that the species might be one foot in the grave already #but also a refusal to accept that. the way people dreamed about how they should live started to shift. you can watch it happen!#there's this feeling that our stewardship of the future must be possible-inevitable even-as imperfect people. imperfect societies.#that we can't achieve utopia but we can find a way to keep going anyway #i don't know. i'm emotional about it. it's a time capsule for an era of radically shifting desires on an international scale #you read stories from that time and you can feel people not wanting to give up. you can feel how badly they wanted tomorrow to include them #i think it's beautiful #fsp speaks

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