So we’ve had a lot of discussion here about Steampunk and about “Retro-futurism” or “Raygun Gothic” or a lot of other terms which describe a certain aesthetic of technology and architecture.
Are there other settings that movies, comics or video games take place in that are worth mentioning? Note - I’m not talking about “what different settings do things take place in?” I mean, “what different settings which center around some sort of man made technology are there?”
Any examples? Two I can think of would be “dystopian futurism” like in Clockwork Orange and “post-apocalyptic” like Waterworld.
I suppose you could call one of 'em the “Dying Earth” genre, as in Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (simultaneously one of the best and worst fantasy novels ever written), and Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time series.
Oh, and then there’s the classic “Lost World” genre; A. Merritt was the master of this one (in terms of fantasy; for straight adventure, H. Rider Haggard was bigger).
I don’t know what you’d call the stuff in the more far-flung bits of Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” stories; maybe something like “Transcendent Tech”. You see something similar in Dan Simmons’ far-future space hippies in his Hyperion/Endymion books.
I’m not sure if this is forbidden by your “different settings for sci-fi” rule, but Firefly is oft described as a Space Western. On the other end of the spectrum is The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., a sci-fi show that takes place in the Wild West, with the characters reacting to such imaginative futuristic technology as hydrogen airships and horseless carriages. I suppose one might be tempted to call it Spurpunk, but that would probably be something entirely different.
Star Wars sometimes gets described as “Space Fantasy”, but more often its omnipresence in modern culture gets it put in the larger category of general Sci-Fi.
The sci-fi/Western subgenre is usually referred to as “Weird West,” also encompassing the Wild Wild West TV show and movie adaptation and the Wild Arms video game series.
These two paragraphs contradict each other, I would say.
Neither of those genres really revolves around tech, at all, IMO.
Dystopian futures usually have some minor advancements from the present, or regression from the present, depending on what type they are, but that’s just a detail in a genre that’s built primarily around a societal shift. A Clockwork Orange is actually a good example of this - the story works exactly the same way if you assume the technology is the same as when your reading it, or advanced noticeably, or regressed some. Even the Ludovico technique, which propels the climax of the story, is more of a mcguffin to get on with the story.
Likewise, post-apocalyptic settings, while they may have a tech component, most (not all) of the time it’s simply a mcguffin to kick things off, or a side-effect of the setting. A post-apoc setting may have been set off by an atomic war, a disease. a natural disaster, or any number of other things. It may retain it’s pre-apocalypse tech - which may have advanced past ‘the present’, it may not have - it may have regressed, it may even have continued advancing - though I can think of no examples of this one, it’s not impossible.
Another fantasy-tech setting - which can be terrific if done right, but rarely is - is what I call “ultra-far future” or “bizzarro-future”. It’s set so far ahead that people there have completely forgotten “our” present and have reverted to older forms of government, society and warfare, while at the same time retaining a certain amount of super-advanced technology. The classic examples for this are Frank Herbert’s *Dune * series and Gene Wolf *New Sun * books.
There are occasional settings that could be described as ‘magitech’, for lack of a better word. Where magic exists, and either supplements or replaces technology, but most importantly it is treated like technology. It’s everywhere, it shapes society, it’s understood scientifically, and treated as an exploitable tool and resource. Poul Anderson’s Operation : Chaos, Operation : Luna, and y Turtledove’s The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump come to mind. The former two exist in an alternate America where magic and technology coexist fairly equally; the latter is an alternate America where magic predominates and largely replaces our technology ( which is much cruder ), but with largely the same result.
There’s a certain subgenre of fantasy/science fiction, but I’m not sure if it has a name. Things like Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery, Julian May, or Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy. The story revolves around magic/psychic powers although the two are pretty much interchangable. While the story centers around “magic”, magic isn’t much like traditional magic in high fantasy or swords and sorcery or fairy tales. It’s sort of a technology, because characters tap into nodes, put up shields, sense dislocations in energy fields, and suchlike. Usually featuring an unusually high concentration of Mary Sue characters.
Another tech setting is what the Tropes site calls Bamboo Technology. This is defined as what the Professor from Gilligan’s Island could build. More broadly, it could be defined as anything that could be built or devised with pre-metal tools by some Stone-age DaVinci. Clan of the Cave Bear counts in many respects, as does the old genre of the Cave Man Who Invented, in different stories, the bow, the canoe, the tamed wolf, etc. The hangglider built from tanned hides and poles lashed together with rawhide, as in Return of the Jedi, is the epitome of Bamboo Tech.
I guess you could call this Biotech: A civilization whose most important technology is based on highly bred living things, like the dinosaur civlization of Harry Harrison’s Eden Series, or the (human) Martian civilization of S.M. Stirling’s In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. See also Abraxas and the Earthman, a graphic novel set in an ET civilization where whalers in tree-spaceships hunt flying whales, using hand-thrown harpoons.