A spinner heads towards the Tyrell Corp. headquarters in Blade Runner (1982)

While the term Cyberpunk has its literary origins in the works of modern masters such as William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan, mention the “look” of Cyberpunk and the Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner (1982), is almost always the example put forth. The visual shorthand established in that film — dark, rainy, urban landscapes — were to some degree a callback to film noir, but updated with an abundance of neon signs and and a multicultural street life. By the end of the decade, Japanese manga, especially the popular Akira and Ghost in the Shell titles, gave the Cyberpunk look a global presence.

Of course the Cyberpunk look was a product of the times. Mixing rebellious youth culture (punk) with advancing technology (personal computers, the Walkman), the explosion of capitalism (exemplified by Wall Street’s ‘Greed is Good’ maxim) and the lingering skepticism of the military-industrial complex, the late-70s and early-80s were a deeply cynical time that called for a visual identity to match.

Buck Rogers (1939)

Cyberpunk’s three decade+ hold on the visual identity of the genre is not dissimilar in its duration from the signature science fiction look that came before it. As any fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 can tell you, the colorful, military-inspired uniforms of Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon, along with shiny metallic jumpsuits were a staple of the genre for a good thirty years. The Atomic Age and Space Age ushered in a vision of the future that was clean, crisp and bright.

In 1968 Stanley Kubrick shook up the genre with 2001, a modern look that kept much of the clean space age look, but married it with the realities of NASA (the U.S. would put a man on the moon one year after the film’s release. Related - see this brilliant breakdown of the typographical design elements of 2001).

Less than a decade later, Star Wars would reshape the science fiction landscape, and generate many copycats, but the Star Wars Universe is more rooted in fantasy (and Westerns and Samurai films) than in hard science fiction, and so while Star Wars has an out-sized place in the history of the genre, I don’t know that it has had the same cultural impact from a visual perspective as Cyberpunk.

But now, some three decades-plus since we first “saw” Cyberpunk, what do we have now? Is there a unifying visual idea that we associate with modern (2000 and beyond) science fiction? I’ve noticed over the last decade or so that there are some recurring themes. Perhaps not exclusive to science fiction - in the same way that the Cyberpunk aesthetic wasn’t exclusive to science fiction (see: Black Rain) - but that I’ve seen recurring in genre work.

I call it Hard Concrete.

Like Cyberpunk and Atomic Age &Space Age design before it, Hard Concrete is linked to the realities of the times. If Cyberpunk was the visual embodiment of the corporation as mysterious behemoth, Hard Concrete parallels a world where corporations and governments have been exposed as brutal, uncaring and stripped of their shiny, mirror-glass facades. They may be no less controlling, violent or malevolent, they just no longer bother to hide it.

Author and historian James Gleick in his book Time Travel (p. 305) touches on this evolution of the design aesthetics that have influenced science fiction:

“The aesthetic of futurism changed, too, without anyone issuing a manifesto — from big and bold, primary colors and metallic shine to grim, dank rot and ruins.”

This may not align exactly with my view, but it does suggest Gleick is seeing an evolution similar to the one I’m examining. Let me walk you through some examples: