> -----Original Message----- > From: robin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 21 April 2004 16:25 > > secondly techno, whilst undeniably based on earlier music, is an 80s > phenomena. up until the 80s most science fiction (especially > that shown in film) perpetuated the 50s style of optimistic futurism. > sci-fi writing got a lot darker during the 80s with cyber-punks etc > (tho Philip K Dick had been doing this for years, i digress)
Or you could go even further back and look at the dystopianism of early writers like Wells, Huxley, Stapledon and Zamyatin - a lot of science fiction from early on in the 20th century had fairly pessimistic overtones, and quite rightly so, as things like WW1 and WW2 were yet to come. But it's definitely true that it was only in the 1960s that that sort of thing started to take hold again, after the hugely optimistic post-war era. > and now mass media has caught on to that less than bright view of > things (almost all sci-fi in films is of this type now). it's far harder > to have a musical concept that appeals to people in a club that is _that_ > dystopian. True, but on the other hand it's not unimaginable. A lot of techno music that's been going down well in clubs these last 15 years has been very dark, very apocalyptic; it's not all been sweetness and light. And then when you look at labels like PCP, producers like The Mover and so on, there's been a sub-strand of electronic music active for a while which you could say presents that grim and pessimistic view of the future. > thirdly, as has already been pointed out people now don't view the > technology as being the thing we aim for in the future (it's a given) > and look at a future where interpersonal relationships, rather than > peoples relationships with the technology, are focused on. > possibly with > more of a focus on some kind of spirituality (see psy/goa trance?). I quite like the idea of the future still being summed up by technological advances, but that these technological advances are not necessarily sparkly and bright; perhaps they're quite scary and quite worrying to a lot of people. We're at a stage where a lot of things on the horizon are very contentious and a bit disturbing; genetics, nanotechnology, etc etc. And god only knows what sorts of weapons are going to be developed and deployed in the next 50 years. So maybe one futuristic theme that can be adopted at present is the idea of "scary technology"? Maybe "Radioactivity" is a more futuristic piece of music right now than "Computer World" or "Numbers"? Brendan
