there’s still goofy magic sci-fi designs now, and there have always been more ‘realistic’ designs based on (to varying degrees) real scientific and engineering knowhow. the only way one could come to this conclusion would be by cherry-picking your examples. if you compare ‘the jetsons’ to ‘mass effect’, sure, it supports your conclusion, but on the other hand, contrasting ‘rick and morty’ against ‘2001: a space odyssey’ would give a rather different conclusion.
I finished reading Dragon’s Egg (1980) recently and at the back of the book was schematics, drawings, and layouts describing the various things in the novel.
There, indeed, have always been varying levels of “hardness” in sci-fi.
Different ways of working, we don’t need to organize everything around hierarchies
The natural result of canon-obsessed nerds.
So not true man there were way more explosion diagrams and shit back then, this hasn’t changed it’s just different artists work differently
Someone never read Clark or Asimov. Some of the sci fi greats were absolutely physics nerds
But i like reading about the engineering in hard sci-fi…
Vanquish! The greatest game no one played!
sci-fantasy is the ultimate genre :3
They didn’t think it’s just magic back then either. They thought those things would be possible in the future.
I usually love and prefer the goofy look of old SciFi, but seeing the brutalist, utilitarian aesthetics of the tech in the two newest Dune movies convinced me of that the new designs can be awesome when done right.
