#50's scifi

[technicallyclassyperfection]

ed emshwiller cover art for galaxy, january 1956

~ I loved the rocket kettle.

[slick-devon]

Buck Rogers

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on DuranDuranTulsa's Plenty Scary Movie...The Wasp Woman (1959) on classic DVD 📀! #movie #movies #horror #scifi #monstermovies #creaturefeature #TheWaspWoman #RogerCorman #riprogercorman #50s #DVD #durandurantulsa #durandurantulsasplentyscarymovie #plentyscarymovie #8sThePlace #ktul

[ryversreality]

pinup of Helmethead

I am finished with winter now I want summer 😁👍🏖️

[howlingmadmoonwolf]

The Man from Planet X (1951)

"The Deadliest Enemy the World has ever Known!"

[spockeye-fierce]

[williamjosephroberts]

Don't you love it when inspiration hits just right?

Don't you love it when inspiration hits just right?

Usually, for me, ideas tend to hit right when I’m in the middle of doing something, hands covered in grease, in the shower, doing the dishes, etc. So usually, I’ll have to repeat the idea to myself until I can scramble for a notepad or my phone to jot down the idea and get it out of the brain pan. Luckily the idea that hit recently, happened to be while we were hanging out in Pigeon Forge for…

[legally-obligated-to-nonsense]

I need the next great sci-fi movie to open specifically to this song and this song only.

[motelfullmassage]

Movies for Halloween

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

I have a weakness for 50's SciFi movies and this is one of the first I remember seeing on one of the creature feature shows from back in the day. In it, Col. Edward Carruthers is the only survivor of a mission to Mars gone bad. When the rescue ship arrives, they accuse him of having killed the other members of his mission for their food and water rations. On their way back to Earth, however, they find that they have a stowaway, and Col. Carruthers might not be the culprit after all! Enjoy!

[lemon-shortbread]

love preg content that takes place in idealized versions of different time periods

pirates trying to navigate labor on their ship, old timey cowboys breeding each other on long journeys, regency era aristocrats pregnant with their secret lover's children, 50's greasers knocking up their straight laced partners (or vice versa), shit, even like, cheesy eighties alien movie style vibes with someone getting used as an incubator for an alien, or futuristic scifi shenanigans resulting in pregnancy

[stra-tek]

More Roddenberry Archive musings...

This is supposedly the launch configuration of the Prime universe U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701's main bridge. It's based on the first piece of concept art for the TOS set, and is one of several weird not-quite-canon things the Roddenberry Archive has decided to consider canonical. 2 command chairs and the whole centre console and chairs spins to face the very minimalist 60's scifi perimeter consoles or viewscreen. Try to imagine Captain April and first officer Chris Pike on this bridge, it's weird.

Behold! The top of the Jeffries Tube.

FERENGI ATM MACHINE ON THE PROMENADE!!!!

The view from OG Captain Pike's bed, featuring his awesome TV, his laser gun and his Starfleet hat. We wouldn't get hats back in Trek for 50 years.

This is inside the Ringship Enterprise XCV-330, circa 2100. The Ringship in canon was seen only in picture form or a desktop model, we never saw inside. The ship was actually designed for a non-Trek Roddenberry scifi show called Starship which never came to be, and there was actually concept art made for the interior which the RA people decided to import to Trek too. Predating the transporter, here is the Metafier.

Discovery Season 2's U.S.S. Enterprise has a cool corridor running around it. Walk around it and... it goes nowhere😂 the Archive tries to balance the reality of everything being a television show with the fantasy of a 100% accurate in-universe museum, it'll give sets ceilings to make them into a believable spaceship but doesn't want to go nuts inventing too much of it's own stuff and that sometimes leads to weird stuff like this dead end

Speaking of ceilings, here's the ceiling and lights of the classic TOS Enterprise's corridors. I think they did a decent job keeping to the TOS aesthetic. The sets TOS was filmed on didn't have ceilings at all.

The Enterprise-B actually had a red carpet for special guests Kirk, Scotty and Chekov

Strange New Worlds has the coolest transporter room of all. Just look at it😍

The TNG Enterprise battle bridge has it's own ready room! And it's super tiny, ultra cramped and Picard probably never used it because there's no replicator in there and thus no access to tea.

The 1st version of TNG engineering's big Master Systems Display as seen in "Encounter at Farpoint". Ten Forward wouldn't be a thing until season 2, and you can see here an earlier deck layout and the original concept for the saucer rim, a corridor walkway with windows above and below. You'll also note Ten Forward would actually be on deck 11 had they not changed the diagram by then.

Kirk's quarters on the TOS Enterprise has dresser drawers full of uniforms for when his gets torn

Walking around the Roddenberry Archive ships is eerie as hell. You're the only one on board, exploring corridors and poking your head into rooms. These starships are liminal spaces. This for me adds to the atmosphere greatly.

Here's the link (enjoy before it vanishes again!):

Roddenberry.x.io

Here's my original post about the Roddenberry Archive:

Also a clarification, I was wrong when I said it won't be in VR. There is one VR setup it was designed for - the $3,000 Apple Vision Pro. More details here, although it appears to only show a 2D window rather than be fully immersive 3D, possibly confirming what I was told previously that no current 3D setup is capable of doing a true VR experience:

[airic-fenn]

If youre pissed that WOTC is revoking its old ogl, you might be wanting to boycott them go play other games for a bit.

Now Im not a die-hard expert on all the ttrpgs out there, but there are a few that I particularly like and recommend if you dont know where to start:

• Ryuutama

I love Ryuutama so much. Its a lot simpler than dnd and really gives older japanese rpg video game vibes. Its very cozy fantasy with a heavy focus on adventuring and story telling than on battling. The english translation was actually a kickstarter thing, and it’s also in dire need of more homebrew content because there was supposed to be a translation of the supplement but thats probably never gonna happen anytime soon, if ever.

• Call of Catthulhu

No, I did not spell it wrong. Put simply, Call of Catthulhu is Call of Cthulhu but with cats. You all play cats. Dont let that fool you though, it can get surprisingly tense and gruesome if you play it right. You’ll probably love it if you were a warrior cats kid.

• Delta Green (and CoC in general)

“Modern” (1980’s) setting for (actual) Call of Cthulhu. The CoC games are fun if you like mysteries, conspiracies and yknow. cosmic horror stuff.

• Traveller

A scifi rp where you play a dude in space (an explorer, traveller, soldier or trader). This one is fun because character creation is VERY extensive and is part of the gameplay, but before the story starts. You make roles to determine all of the things that happened to you prior to the adventure like, did you go to university, have you suffered any life-altering injuries to your mind or body bc of some terrible accident, did you accidentally get aged 50 years older by getting zapped through a wormhole? Fun stuff like that. My friend calls it the existential crises rpg.

• Pathfinder

I mention it obligatorily because people tell me its the most like dnd without technically being dnd but I havent played it.

Anyway there are definitely so many more games but those are the ones I’ve played (other than pathfinder) and enjoyed. Feel free to reblog with your own additions to the list.

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on DuranDuranTulsa's Plenty Scary Movie 🎥... Attack Of The Giant Leeches (1959) on classic DVD 📀! #movie #movies #horror #scifi #monstermovies #creaturefeature #attackofthegiantleeches #50s #durandurantulsa #plentyscarymovie #8sThePlace #ktul #durandurantulsasplentyscarymovie

[thelogicalghost]

okay someone needs to fucking explain Fallout worldbuilding to me

OKAY SO

I'm a writer and my friends and I get maybe a little obsessed with worldbuilding. Like, famously had a three hour heated argument over theoretical Chinese empirical expansion, obsessed. So I tend to think a lot about worldbuilding when I interact with fiction.

I never played the Fallout games as a kid, I know, sue me, but there was cultural osmosis cause I'm still a video game nerd who hangs out with other video game nerds. So I understood that Fallout takes place in a post-nuclear-MAD world with a 50's aesthetic. You get some scifi elements but it's all that old "classic" scifi stuff like robot butlers.

I assumed, therefore, that the Fallout series takes place in an alternate universe where the Cold War went hot. At the most, maybe it was, like 1975? And the people who designed the Vault stuff were just Old and liked The Good Old Days.

So I was watching the new TV show with my husband when he says, casually, that in Fallout, the nuclear apocalypse happened in 2070.

2070!?!?!?!?!?!?????????

According to the Fallout universe, technology just ... went in a different direction after the Space Race, with little to no improvement in communications (so no cable TV or fax machines or internet) but had other big developments, like putting a colony on the Moon, and a lot of biomedical research, and robots with varying levels of AI.

This is absolutely bonkers.

But imo what's worse is the idea that culture either completely stagnated for over a century, or we hit a period of regression/nostalgia so hard it was virtually indistinguishable from that earlier time.

I'm sorry, but Fallout writers, what the actual fuck?!?

Let me list some of the immediately problems I see with this:

If you're saying all the scientists on earth focused entirely on robotics and medical technology, that STILL. DOES NOT. COVER. 120 YEARS. OF DEVELOPMENT. Especially in a modern fictional context!!!

Technological advancements drive cultural change, which drives technology. Even if we didn't get smartphones, there were changes, and even the most heavily nostalgic conservatives are not going to be the same now as they were 120 years ago. They might be worse, but still, they're going to be different.

Not to mention the culture that built the Vaults is one that's been living in a state of perpetual Cold War for multiple generations. They may be nostalgic for post-WWII picket fences, but that wistfulness is going to feel incredibly different than the relentless optimism that's at the core of the 1950's aesthetic.

This is also absolutely the wrong time period to pick if you're arbitrarily going to decide modern communication methods were never invented. The Cold War was a critical factor in the need for improved security of classified communication, as well as the quality and accessibility of propaganda. IMO a USA that never left the Cold War would have building-sized TV screen billboard ads before the personal home computer.

(funny enough the boom for chemical and biochemical science was already over at this point. There's a saying that WWI was the Chemists' War, and WWII was the Physicists' War, and that's very reflective of where innovators were looking, where funding was going, and thus, what technologies were being developed.)

The weirdest thing about all of this to me is that this is so atypical of all the genres Fallout is leaning on. The 1940's scifi aesthetic at the core of this concept is optimistic exactly because it came before the existential dread of the Cold War; it was that dread, in part, that punctured the post-war dream. Steampunk settings sometimes leap forward a century or two without technological advancement, but the cultural setting of Victorian England is very different and it's plausible that if ideas of the era like "aether" had been proven true, technology would have developed very differently. Then newer genres like Cyberpunk, the ones that came during and after the Cold War, almost always demonstrate how cultures have influenced each other, because the authors of the developing scifi genre had started to realize the future would be shaped by more than just ray guns and spaceships.

So yeah, it absolutely boggles my mind that this is a choice the Fallout writers made and have stuck to faithfully.

[torpublishinggroup]

The cover for Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini is here! This novel populates another corner of the expansive scifi world(s) of the Fractalverse that began with 2020′s To Sleep In a Sea of Stars 👽🌃

Coming 5.16.23

MORE ABOUT FRACTAL NOISE

July 25th, 2234: The crew of the Adamura discovers the Anomaly. On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII:a circular pit, 50 kilometers wide. Its curve not of nature, but design. Now, a small team must land and journey on foot across the surface to learn who built the hole and why. But they all carry the burdens of lives carved out on disparate colonies in the cruel cold of space. For some the mission is the dream of the lifetime, for others a risk not worth taking, and for one it is a desperate attempt to find meaning in an uncaring universe. Each step they take toward the mysterious abyss is more punishing than the last. And the ghosts of their past follow.

[quill-of-thoth]

I do think it's not a net positive that people's exposure to science fiction treatments of space travel and artificial intelligence is so firmly rooted in "classic" scifi, because every single year that shit lags so much further beyond even a lay understanding of its subjects. Some of it is inevitable artifacts of how stories are constructed - there's no point in writing a story with an AI robot without them being a character, and to do that you have to personify them to a ridiculous extent - but an Asimov robot has more in common with a fairy than with an actual computer. He just did not have the background (In 1950 very few people did) that even a middle school student of today does in both a pop sci understanding of the brain and a pop sci understanding of computers.

Likewise it looked a hell of a lot more plausible - with nuclear power ramping up and NASA pushing for the moon - that scientific breakthroughs would allow us to put humans on mars by the 2000's way back in the 60's. And it makes for an exciting story, so it's inevitable that the idea will stick. But we have public figures whose understanding of science entirely comes from reading 50's and 60's era scifi and that makes for catastrophically bad priorities on their part, which unfortunately means that the rest of us get to deal with their vanity projects.