Raygun Gothic is a catchall term for a visual and architectural style that incorporates various aspects of the

Googie Googie architecture ( ) is a type of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the Atomic Age and the Space Age. It originated in Southern California from the Streamline Moderne architecture of the 1930s, and was popular in the ...

, Streamline Moderne and

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

architectural styles when applied to retrofuturistic

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

environments. Academic Lance Olsen has characterised Raygun Gothic as "a tomorrow that never was". It is inspired by

Space Age The Space Age is a period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events, beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 during 1957, and continuin ...

, raypunk and

atompunk Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of derivatives of cyberpunk have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and ...

subcultures. The style has also been associated with architectural indulgence, and situated in the context of the

golden age The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the '' Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the G ...

of modern design due to its use of features such as "single-support beams,

acute angle In Euclidean geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the '' sides'' of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the ''vertex'' of the angle. Angles formed by two rays lie in the plane that contains the rays. Angles ar ...

s, brightly colored paneling" as well as "shapes and cutouts showing motion".

Origin

The term was coined by

William Gibson William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, hi ...

in his 1981 story " The Gernsback Continuum":" The Gernsback Continuum" in

Notes

4.^ "Loki"(2021).

References

* American architectural styles William Gibson Googie architecture Science fiction themes Retrofuturism Raygun Gothic Space Age {{Arch-style-stub

Origin

See also

Notes

References