Reason for Warning: The page's main image contains depictions of lynching.
Atompunk is an aesthetic centered around a view of the future from the perspective of the 1950s and 1960s. Modern depictions tend to use a distinct, brightly-colored art style but it can also appear just as it does in the page's main image. It often depicts imagery associated with "traditionally American" values, particularly a belief in the nuclear family and the suburban lifestyle. But it's important to note that this isn't the Googie or Raygun Gothic aesthetic; it does not center itself around a utopian future but rather a dystopian nightmare. Atompunk is the dark underbelly of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi characterized by potential dark futures such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, satirical parodies of typically suburban American life such as Dad's Nuke and more recently satirical parodies of the Raygun Gothic and Googie aesthetic such as Futurama.
Visual[]
Atompunk typically envisions a satirical or dark twist on the Raygun Gothic/Googie/Populuxe aesthetic such as post-apocalyptic space age settings like Dad's Nuke and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep though Atompunk will sometimes take the form of the simple Googie aesthetic, just with punk sensibilities.
Fashion[]
Atompunk fashion tends to draw heavy inspiration from how people in the 1950s/1960s viewed how the future was going to look, similarly to Raygun Gothic's fashion, so a lot of the outfits seen in pulp sci-fi of the time tend to be the primarily focus on Atompunk fashion, as well as T-shirts adorned with graphics invoking the covers of pulp sci-fi comic books of the time (which did tend to be rather sexually suggestive from time to time) being part of the Atompunk fashion aesthetic.
Media[]
Literature[]
- Dad's Nuke (1986)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
- The Solar Lottery (1955)
- I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967)
- A Scanner Darkly (1977)
- The Minority Report (1956)
- The Golden Man (1954)
- 2000 A.D (1977-present)
- The Invincible (1964)
- Solaris (1961)
- Gernsback Continuum (1981)
Television[]
- Futurama (1999-present)
- Red Dwarf (1988-present)
- Firefly (2002-2003)
- Cowboy Bebop (1998)
Film[]
- The First Spaceship on Venus (1962)
- Sleeper (1973)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
- Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983)
- Mars Attacks (1996)
- Logan’s Run (1976)
- Stalker (1979)
Video Games[]
- Fallout series (1997-present)
- Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005)
- The Outer Worlds (2019)
- Prey (2017)
- The Invincible (2023)
Mods[]
- The New Order: Last Days of Europe
Podcasts/Radio[]
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (1978)
Music[]
- The New Albion Guide to Analogue Consciousness, An Atompunk Opera (2014)
Genres[]
History[]
The Atompunk aesthetic originated from the Raygun Gothic and Googie aesthetic being born from the eccentric but brilliant mind of Philip K Dick with the book known as Solar Lottery. It is the dark underbelly of the Raygun Gothic aesthetic and was created as a way to vent frustration at 1950s and 60s American society, acting as the counterculture to the typically utopian or otherwise non-dystopian stories that were popular at the time.
The term Atompunk was obviously created after Cyberpunk was invented but it has existed in spirit long before the aesthetic made pessimism popular similar to Dieselpunk works such as Metropolis and Things to Come.
Why is this stuff considered atompunk while media such as The Jetsons, Calvin and Hobbes and all the other non-dystopian 60s/50s retrofuturism are considered Raygun Gothic? Simple, the term punk has a meaning. While most would liken the meaning to just being connected to the punk movement, like cyberpunk, that's a misattribution; instead, the term punk refers to how countercultural it was in its context. Steampunk was countercultural in the sense that it was the development of a completely unique and new genre that oftentimes defied societal norms. Dieselpunk consists of two aesthetics: Ottensian Dieselpunk/Decopunk and Piecraftian Dieselpunk ( every other part of the Dieselpunk genre like Brazil, Metropolis, Things To Come, Etc) which were created as counterculture in their respective genres (Ottensian after World War 2, Piecraftian during and before World War 2). Meanwhile, The Jetsons was created specifically as a celebration of its culture and not something designed to push against the culture; but the things Phillip K Dick made were designed as counterculture.
The most well-known example of Atompunk in the present day is the Fallout series, which seems to take influence from early-to-mid atompunk media such as 2000 AD and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep