How long will it be before there’s a nostalgia movement in scifi art and literature based on the romantic, glamourous and elegant age of oil? The golden age of limitless energy and bounty!
Steam power and its associated Victorianesque esthetic trappings took about a hundred years to acquire an almost magical naieve charm and become a scifi fad. We’ve still got a very rough 20 years or so before the end of oil as a primary fuel source, but people are nostalgic for the good old days already. I figure we’ll see the first stirrings of an oilpunk movement in as little as ten years. I also predict oilpunk will make about as much logical sense as steampunk does today. I hate to break it to you guys – I love all those brass fixtures and ridiculous widgets as much as anyone – but we left steam power behind for a reason and we were quite happy to do so.
I can only hope that movies (or their equivalent) spawned from the oilpunk movement will be of slightly higher quality than the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A Victorian car chase…through the streets of Venice. The streets…of Venice…
In America, they’ll have films with huge, loud cars and giant explosions of tankers. In Japan, flying, oil powered cities.
Hahahaha! And the cities will STILL be held aloft by giant propellers.
Propellers? This is the oil age man, we don’t float our cities with anything but massive, vertical jet engines.
Cool idea!
I’m a bit lost. Can you differentiate Oilpunk from Dieselpunk? Or are we talking about gasolinepunk which would be the same as the ’60s hot rod era? This sounds fascinating, but I feel lost.
Help!
Fang Langford
Why a trend has to revolve around transportation methods is beyond me.
I identify with the Dust Bowl era fashion and music, but shy away from any label with the word “punk” in it. I prefer Roustabout or just Roustie. But I have to say PetrolPunk has a nice ring to it.
Petropunk is definitely cooler. I guess what I was thinking with the whole genre idea is less about mechanics/technology and more cultural. Like, what if the Brady Bunch universe was actually real and the timeline just kept going into the 21st century and beyond, with oil getting cheaper and MORE plentiful all the time, with zero environmental or political consequences. Houses just getting bigger, less expensive to heat, cars getting more muscular, plastics so cheap they weren’t even worth charging for, etc.
I think the digital (paperless) future will bring about a fascination with ‘pulppunk/paperpunk’ long before humanity will look fondly back on the oil era.
The death of the blackgold era will not be happy. It will result in international animosity, death and destruction. The rebirth of civilization afterwards will ban all references to petroleum.
“The rebirth of civilization afterwards”
I like that kind of talk.
http://www.oilpunk.com
There’s an oilpunk comic already out there, called the Monster Commute:
It is a bit of a mix of fantasy and oilpunk, but it’s kinda cool once you get to the story part.
The art is great, too, if you like such things.
There was a funny scene in the otherwise pretty awful Mission to Mars (or possibly Red Planet, they’re practically interchangeable…) where one of the astronauts turns up to a party in a Cadillac and gets ribbed by his (electric-car driving) friends – he raves about internal combustion the way vinyl-lovers talk to the mp3 generation.
I was in an HMV for the first time in years this weekend. Not only was I surprised to see that so many people are buying CD,s but they actually had a vinyl section. A big one too! All new releases.
The art is great, too, if you like such things.
I agree