Atomic Glow
The future ain’t what it used to be…
The discovery of nuclear fission was, perhaps, one of the most defining events of the first half of the 20th century. Its weaponization was the exclamation point at the end of the bloodiest conflict of human history; but in its harnessing for creative, rather than destructive, purposes we found inspiration. Sure, right now nuclear energy seems like a relic of the past - a view no doubt shaped by the catastrophes that left a deep mark on the public conscience - but in the past, it was the future. A consumeristic, robotized future that hadn’t seen the mass-scale miniaturization of electronics that revolutionized our world much more than nuclear energy ever could.
Enter the world of Fallout, an homage to the future that never came to be before anything else, and enter the Rocket 69, which perfectly represents an atomic society that nuked itself into oblivion. It’s the jet-age dreams of the early 60s, substantiated: a feast of wasteful engineering, it’s larger than a Rolls-Royce and yet only sits one occupant in a jet-like bubble canopy. Its handling is better suited at driving in the elevated highways of the pre-apocalyptic US than it is to, well, doing anything that involves movement of the plane-like joystick. The result of this reinterpretation of the 60s vision of the future manages to look more gaudy than sporty… Just as you’d expect!
I guess that in the end, I’m glad I live in a world where the highest realization of any eventual desire for an egocentric car is the BAC Mono. But fantasy exercises like this highlight in a dramatic view that the future ain’t what it used to be; that maybe, as a whole, we’ve become a society of sensible people which can’t enjoy a car that is focused not on pure performance, but rather on big, meaningless numbers and promises and using bleeding-edge technology just for the heck of it.
(All shots are edited)
