If EVER there was a pop cultural franchise that Did Not Cope Well with 1989 and what came after...

so like Ozymandius became an Internet tycoon I guess and The Squid which was sort of a cipher for the New Age and Roswell conspiracydom and all associated paranormal weirdness just became X-Files and neoNazis

Ozy's entire evil plan didn't have to happen so whoops

But now we're in a similar but messier mess so what would Ozy do to 'help'

Massacre lots of people OF COURSE YES, but who and why?

@natecull I mean…Watchmen is so rooted in the Cold War and nuclear paranoia that it doesn't make much sense to shift it to a new context. It's a period piece. A common feature of much 20th-century English-language science fiction!

@nev Yes, exactly.

But I guess what I'm wondering is if there's been a work that deals *with* that cultural whiplash that occured after 1989, when the Cold war stalemate that had defined a generation of art was shattered.

Terminator 2 is one of the few things I can point to that consciously takes on that meta challenge. 'No fate but what we make', etc.

The rest of pop culture sort of sleepwalked into the 90s and then switched its apocalypse mode to anti-terrorism/anti-immigrant hysteria.

@nev I suppose in comics, Global Frequency sort of counts... but even then it comes from a 'the war is over but the weapons remain' idea and now seems impossibly optimistic.

@natecull When I think about the transition from Cold War-era sf to now, I think of late/post-cyberpunk? Like cynical cyberpunk set in a sort of crapsack world where we know the Singularity's not coming. Bruce Sterling's "Taklamakan" and Candas Jane Dorsey's "(Learning About) Machine Sex" come to mind.

@natecull That's a really good question. Hmmmm...

(I feel like eco-sf is currently the equivalent of Cold War/nuclear apocalypse sf for us—not necessarily its prevalence, but the realistic-ness. Where ppl will look back and be like "oh, THAT'S how they thought the world was going to end.")

@nev Yeah, climate change seems to have edged into the position (over the last decade) that nuclear once held. With almost exactly the same politics associated: scientists, artists and liberals deeply concerned to the point of grim fatalism and despair; conservatives wilfully ignorant and hostile to any idea of threat.

@natecull And/or deliberately accelerating it for ideological purposes, even though it will end us all. Yeah. That's a really good point

@natecull (brb gotta fold laundry)

@nev And of course eco worries have paralleled nuclear war as they're both post-1945 developments, mostly.

People like Farley Mowat were some of the first popular conservationists but had also been involved in seizing German rockets during WW2.

@nev Like just what was going on here. Canadians nicking German V2s from the Brits... http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/king-farley-mowat-and-the-story-of-canadas-lost-nazi-rocket

@natecull wow, I didn't remember this part in Gravity's Rainbow

@natecull also apropos of nothing I just wanna bring up the Diefenbunker. yeah that's all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Government_Headquarters

@natecull also, Weird Ecological Mutant Shit is the overlap of that Venn diagram

@natecull It'd be a bit like trying to translate stuff like Wargames or The Hunt for Red October or even The Crucible into right-now terms where the President is colluding with Russia, you know?

@natecull @nev Star Trek VI, but the Klingon and Romulan conspirators work with Earth's radical isolationist Terra Prime revival and Eugenics Wars fanboys to elect the new President of the Federation.