Life on Uranus. Frank R. Paul, back cover of Fantastic Adventures, April 1940. Public domain.
Raygun
Gothic
Named twice, both times by someone who did not like it.
Life on Uranus. Frank R. Paul, back cover of Fantastic Adventures, April 1940. Public domain.
Named twice, both times by someone who did not like it.
The 1930s-to-1960s future as drawn for magazine covers and roadside signs, made of fins, chrome, ray guns and glass domes.
These two paintings are consecutive months of the same series. Frank R. Paul painted a planet a month on the back cover of Fantastic Adventures, each one captioned with a short paragraph of explanation — "Theoretically, creatures such as these might inhabit this satellite." Speculation, issued as a briefing, for twenty cents.
Life on Io. Frank R. Paul, back cover of Fantastic Adventures, May 1940. Public domain.
In February 1952 the architecture critic Douglas Haskell published an article in House and Home called "Googie Architecture." He took the name from Googie's, a coffee shop at Sunset and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles, designed in 1949 by John Lautner.
Haskell disliked the style intensely. Part of the article is written in the voice of an invented Professor Thrugg, whose overheated praise was the point — a way of indicting the style by having a fool admire it.
The insult stuck. Within a generation "Googie" had drifted into a neutral term, and it is now the standard word for the whole family of upswept roofs, boomerangs and starburst signs.
The Wich Stand menu, Los Angeles, 1960s. Public domain.
The menu belongs to that world exactly: the space-age roof, drawn as a line illustration, sitting above a list of prices for hot cakes.
In 1981 William Gibson published a short story called "The Gernsback Continuum," about a photographer who begins to see the future that never arrived — chrome, fins, and vast winged aircraft, appearing to him like a hallucination he cannot shake.
A character in the story gives the style its name. Gibson has him describe it as
"a kind of alternate America… A 1980 that never happened, an architecture of broken dreams."
The critic Lance Olsen later summarised the whole aesthetic as "a tomorrow that never was."
Gibson coined "raygun gothic" in 1981. Gardner Dozois pinned the word "cyberpunk" on Gibson in 1984. The man who became the face of one future had already, first, named the corpse of the previous one.
And the Gernsback in that title is Hugo Gernsback — the editor who published exactly these covers, with exactly these captions.
Vertical, stepped setbacks, sunburst fans, chevrons. Polished stone, brass, chrome. Built for banks, picture palaces and skyscraper crowns.
Horizontal, rounded corners, three speed lines, portholes. White cement, glass block, stainless steel. The shape came out of wind tunnels and was then applied to refrigerators, staplers and pencil sharpeners.
Cantilevered roofs lifting at one end, boomerangs, starburst signs, plate glass and neon. Built for coffee shops, motels, gas stations and bowling alleys, and shaped to be legible from a car doing forty.
Raygun gothic is what happens when all three are used to draw the future, plus the three things no building ever had — fins, ray guns, and a glass dome over a city.
Deco goes up, Streamline goes forward, Googie goes skyward, and not one of the three was made by anyone who thought they were doing science fiction.
1959 Cadillac Series 62, tailfin. CC0.
The fin is the signature, and it is the clearest thing to look for. A fin does nothing on a car. It steadies a rocket in atmosphere and it steadies nothing at all in a parking lot, and by 1959 Cadillac had raised it as high as it would ever go.
The shape spread to objects with no relationship to flight: vacuum cleaners, toasters, radios, pencil sharpeners. A fin was a claim about the future, bolted to something that was going nowhere.
Atompunk has the same empty third answer and finds it frightening. Raygun gothic finds it comfortable.
The Theme Building, Los Angeles International Airport, completed 1961. CC0.
For roughly a decade, American roadside architecture actually looked like the magazine covers. The Theme Building at Los Angeles airport, finished in 1961, is a saucer held up on four crossed legs, and there was a restaurant inside it. Seattle put a saucer on a stalk and called it the Space Needle. Coffee shops got parabolic roofs and pylon signs lit in neon.
Most of it came down for parking. The paintings outlasted the buildings.
Both of its names were written by people looking at it from the outside. It never came up with a word of its own.