This post is titled:

Prediction

I predict that in twenty or thirty years time, the type of person who is curently into "steampunk" will be into what I choose to call "Gernspunk" after legendary SF publisher Hugo Gernsback. Gernspunk will be about the postwar "atomic age" in the way that steampunk today is about the "steam age" of the late 1800's. Instead of being based on the first SF of Verne and Wells, it will be based on the golden age of SF like "Forbidden Planet".

People will build sleek metal vehicles, and communicate via telescreens. People will eat food that has been compressed into pills, and build robots that perform menial tasks. They will wear bulky space suits that have rings around the cuffs and have big bubble helmets with little antennae on top. Ray guns and disintegrator pistols will still be the accesory of choice, but the dials and aetheric oscillators will make way for gauges and msterious radioactive crystals.

They will speak with midwestern US accents and be completely slean shaven with buzz-cut hair. They will never swear, and will instead salt their speech with "golly" and "gee-whillikers." One in twenty will go by the name "Cookie" and will drink heavily "on the sly".

For men, the dominant persona will be football hero amateur scientist, and for women, the fiesty girl reporter or maybe lab assistant to the elder consulting scientist. The emphasis will be on exploration, and the defense of Earth against the sinister alien forces bent on enslaving us to foreign empires.

It will be swell.

2010.10.04 at 9:00am EDT

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