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Chernobyl (the series) as template for dystopian atompunk?

Hendryk

Taken back control yet?
Published by SLP
Location
France
Months after watching it, I'm still thinking of Craig Mazin's mini-series Chernobyl, not only because I was in my early teens when the accident happened and it brings back memories, but also because of the masterful reconstitution of late Soviet daily life. It now occurs to me that 1980s USSR was the closest real-life analog to an atompunk setting: it's a society in which what Western pop culture means by "the 1960s" never happened, and the values and societal paradigms of the 1950s remained dominant.

In the USSR there was no (open) societal backlash against the concepts of open-ended industrial growth, being assigned a place by the system, conforming to approved behavioral and sartorial codes, etc. As late as Chernenko's brief tenure, blue jeans and long hair on men were still seen as vaguely subversive, and if you didn't want to attract unwanted attention you basically dressed like an Eisenhower-era office drone. Likewise, when it came to technology there was little if any concern for ergonomy, energy efficicency or user-friendliness, and everything was big, clunky and ugly (though on the plus side it tended to be sturdy). Environmentalism was for foolish Westerners; if you were a good citizen you didn't question the need for more factories, more coal mines, more irrigated agriculture in arid regions, and of course more nuclear power plants--which were perfectly safe because the bosses told you so and they knew better. On the other hand, architects had a surprising amount of leeway to come up with bold, sui generis designs that hinted at a stubborn faith in technological progress, and some of the buildings from that era look endearingly retrofuturistic to us.

I feel it's something to keep in mind for AH worldbuilding.

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