Cory linked to Henry Jenkin’s articles on retro-futurism on one of the BoingBoing posts about (yes) steampunk. Here’s a (long) selection of quotes that I found interesting.
((Note: there’s a printer icon at the bottom of this, this post may be better read offline))

From “The Tomorrow That Never Was”: Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One):

As Bruce Sterling, the co-editor of the Mirrorshades collection where the story appeared, explains,

"Times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when science was safely enshrined - and confined - in an Ivory Tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control. Not for us the steam snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant."

Gibson and Sterling wanted to push science fiction in new directions and saw little use for streamlined airships. Exit the World of Tomorrow, enter the Digital Revolution.

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Many were looking forward to the end of the millennium and looking backwards at the end of what people had called the American Century. The expiration date had come and passed for many of the technological and geopolitical changes predicted at such landmark events as the 1939 World’s Fair.

As the society entered into a new phase of prolonged and profound media change brought about by the so-called “digital revolution,” the nation’s artists were trying to figure out what aspects of science fiction could be carried forward and which needed to be reworked to reflect all of these changes. Cyberpunk emerged as a genre that allowed writers to look forward – even if only 20 minutes into the future – while what I am calling retrofuturism represented a genre that allowed people to look backwards, examining older myths and fantasies against contemporary realities.

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We can measure the heightened perception and acceleration of change in the diminished time spans of science fiction: the earliest stories felt compelled to project forward thousands of years in human history in order to imagine worlds dramatically different than our own; most of the representations of the future at the 1939 World’s Fair, by contrast, were set half a century forward; and many recent science fiction stories, especially those in the cyberpunk, might require only a few years of separation from the present moment. In each cases, though, science fiction deploys the future as a way of distancing us from and reflecting upon the present moment.

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Indeed, the residual is still valuable precisely because elements of the past can function as the basis of a critique of the present, undermining the idea that the dominant is inevitable or natural. Retrofuturism suggests the process by which ideas that once were emergent, once seemed to be futuristic in their implications, can be transformed into residual elements in a culture undergoing rapid and dramatic change.

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Amateur archivists have assembled digital reproductions of the covers of pulp science fiction or popular science magazines, cataloging the various technological wonders or predictions by which an earlier generation sought to understand the directions their society was taking.

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Ironically, the Westinghouse Time Capsule was one of the major attractions at the 1939 World’s Fair – a cache of goods from then contemporary culture which were designed as a form of communication with the future. Those attending the fair were intrigued by the prospect of what future archeologists might make of these various memory traces of their own times, debating what items from 1930s America should be collected and transmitted to future generations.

From “The Tomorrow That Never Was”: Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Two):

Wilson shares with Motter the same disappointment that the future promised by General Electric and Westinghouse never quite came to be:

"The future is now, and we are not impressed. The future was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia - a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Our beloved scientists may be building the future, but some key pieces are missing. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? We can't wait another minute for the future to arrive. The time has come to hold the golden age of science fiction accountable for its fantastic promises...Today zeppelins the size of ocean liners do not hover over fully enclosed skyscraper cities.. Shiny robot servents do not cook breakfast for colonists on the moon. Worst of all, sleek titanium jetpacks are not ready and waiting on showroom floors ...Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book ever written, we are not living in a techno-utopia."

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The idea of the “end of history” has long been part of the utopian imagination but there is something suffocating or claustrophobic about a city which has been locked down by a single vision and has been unable or unwilling to adapt to changed circumstances.

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The inhuman quality of such spaces is indeed part of the point: these buildings were designed on the basis of economic and technological imperatives that had little to do with human nature. No actual human being would be adequate to the demands this future placed upon them.What has led these cities into decline is precisely the inability of their inhabitants to live up to those over-inflated expectations.

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..these buildings have ceased to generate and sustain their inhabitant’s interests, have failed to capture their imagination or inspire their ambitions. The future has simply run out of steam.

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The Hernandez Brothers vividly capture this movement from astonishment to disenchantment in a “Tales from Somnopolis” extra in the back of one of the first issues of Mister X: across three pages of wordless panels, we move from spectacular images of skyscrapers, zeplins, and caretaking robots, through increasingly darker images of social decay and urban blight, ending up an appoclyptic image of a flood which washes the city clean again.

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Motter’s comics, thus, play on this line – inciting our pleasure at seeing these old conceptions of the future realized and our fear that no matter how utopian our aspirations, human societies collapse in upon themselves in the end.

From “The Tomorrow That Never Was”: Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Three):

Of course, these architectural wonders make little sense without digging deeper into the social vision that shaped them. Howard Siegel has traced the ways that a certain ideology of technological utopianism shaped the iconography of early science fiction, starting as a form of social critique of dominant economic institutions, but being highjacked and reworked by the 1939 Fair’s corporate sponsors. As Siegel writes,

"Technological utopianism derived from the belief in technology -- conceived as more than tools and machines alone -- as the means of achieving a 'perfect' society in the near future. Such a society, moreover, would not only be the culmination of the introduction of new tools and machines; it would also be modeled on those tools and machines in its institutions, values and culture."

Technological utopians believed a more perfect society would emerge from a series of breakthroughs in transportation and communication technologies. Siegel explains,

"Connecting all sectors of the technological utopia would be superbly efficient transportation and communication systems, powered almost exclusively by electricity....The specific means of transportation would include automobiles, trains, subways, ships, airplanes, even moving sidewalks. The means of communication would include pneumatic mail tubes, telephones, telegraphs, radios, and mechanically composed newspapers."

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..cities of the future were an army of engineers, city planners, architects, and designers. As Siegel explains,

"In utopia, efficiency would govern government as thoroughly as it would education and industry....Because technicians rather than politicians would run the utopian government, it would be technical rather than political in nature."

This technocratic vision saw central planning and social engineering as new kinds of expertise which might perfect human nature. This same celebration of efficiency and rationalism ran through the discourse of the 1939 Worlds Fair. Here, again, is the narrator from The World of Tomorrow: “City planners and architects believed they knew what the future had to be like and what ordinary Americans needed to learn to be able to live successfully in it.”

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Read through a contemporary lens, the cities imagined by the technological utopians can seem bloodless and antiseptic.

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..even though such seedy lowlifes would have had no real place in the official representations of the World of Tomorrow which had promised that we would have overcome crime, eradicated greed, and otherwise perfected human nature.

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We are operating in the space of what Umberto Eco called “the already said” or James Collins described as “the foregrounding of citations.” For Collins, this “hyperconsciousness” about past representations was a defining feature of American comics of the 1980s, suggesting the connection between Motter’s books and other contemporary works such as Watchman or Dark Knight Returns.

From “Ephemera vs. The Apocalypse”: Retrofuturism After 9/11:

Comics entered American newspapers at a moment of rapid, profound, and prolonged change: the dawn of the twentieth century was met with an explosion of new technologies, not to mention significant dislocations of the population from the farms to the cities, from the south to the north, and from Europe to America.

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These comics helped turn-of-the century Americans laugh at things that otherwise felt hopelessly out of control.

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If Motter’s books can be seen as offering at least a critique of older imaginings of technological utopianism, more recent works have turned to retrofuturism as a means of healing wounds and restoring a world — and a world view — that was shattered when the Twin Towers fell.

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..Morrison’s project is retrofuturist to its core, revisiting the imagined city of the future as a source of historical consciousness through which we can understand our current moment. His monuments are completed so that they can serve as targets for imagined future terrorist attacks

Kerry Conran, the director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, was also haunted by ghosts of tomorrows that never were. He told Entertainment Weekly that the film took shape around a haunting mental image of a Zeppelin descending through snow and searchlights toward its moorings in Manhattan.

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As Christian Thorne has suggested, retro “is an unabashedly nationalist project: it sets out to create a distinctly U.S. idiom, one redolent of Fordist prosperity, an American aesthetic culled from the American century, a version of Yankee high design able to compete, at last, with its vaunted European counterparts.” Not surprisingly, American artists have responded to 9/11 with a style of retrofuturism that celebrates the ideals and icons of mid-20th century American culture

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow closes the circle, linking its borrowed images of the future with the popular culture artifacts that draw collectors back to this era in the first place. The film celebrates the “sense of wonder” and the “can do” spirit of an America that was, in the language of the time, constantly striving to reach “new horizons.”

— Thanks for your insight Henry!