This week I had a number of search terms, whichincluded Red Rising (one of my favorite SF series), Hunger Games, terraforming, panspermia, and ray gun gothic. Most of the searches didn’t take me very far, but I fell down a rabbit hole with the “ray gun gothic” search term. 

This term lead me to explore more about all the subgenera of the retrofuturistic science fiction movement and its two biggest derivatives, cyberpunk and steampunk. I learned the nuances that separated steampunk from cyberpunk and how the former is based on an alternative history narrative where steam technology became the main driving force of society, while the later focuses more on AI, computers, and cybernetics. Furthermore, steampunk maintains the Victorian aesthetic while cyberpunk has the high-tech dystopian aesthetic that I often associate with the SF genre (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, etc). I also learned there were even more alternative history derivatives such as diesel punk, ray gun punk, atom punk etc.

https://imgur.com/t/dieselpunk/nlAVD