What are the essential themes of each decade's vision of

>>50873399
For what country/culture?

Robotech/Macross was made in the 1980s and isn't dark and dreary.

>>50873399

>1970s

Psychedelic and distopian, in a social sense.

>1990s

Optimism generally.

>>50873399

its still dark and dreary, its just well lighted

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I guess if you were born in the Soviet Unison the future was a utilitarian paradise of multiple successive five year plans and Soviet Space dominance.

>>50873878
America obviously. We're all American here,right pardner?

>>50873980
1990's was dreary and utilitarian, full of fears about human limitations and the increasing power of machines. That's just from pop culture though. I wasn't actually born for a large chunk of the 1990's

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>>50873399
The 60s were when sci-fi graduated from pure pulp. It was still campy as fuck, but you started seeing shit like Space Opera show up. An inalienable belief in technological progress, with little to no social change.

Years of an unpopular war in the late 60s put a huge dent in America's confidence that they were the automatic winners. The relentless optimism was still there, but diminished. The 70s saw sci-fi start looking at the problems of the day and used the future to magnify it. Lots of chems and drug usage. Lots of looking at what society might be. What it could be. What it should be. Also, the continued belief that technology would endlessly progress in a linear fashion, with things looking very similar to the day, just bigger, faster, and with more blinking lights.

The cold war got to its coldest point in the 80s, and the entire decade is suffused with the perpetual threat of instant annihilation. The 80s produced some of the darkest sci-fi to date.The propagation of computers into many facets of common human life brought about many authors to question what defines "human". Darker literary themes of chem and general technology abuse entered the mainstream with Cyberpunk. Loss of trust in government and corporate instutions and massive financial cutbacks had people starting to doubt the inevitable manifest destiny into the stars.

The 90s saw the end of the cold war and the return of the good times. Progress was no longer only measured with "how far" and "how fast", but the human element returned, with less emphasis on shiny technological toys and more on how they could improve the fundamental human experience. Also, the march of moore's law and the rise of large networks and consumer internet access caught everyone off guard and, in hindsight, almost all sci-fi predictions about information technology were hilariously conservative.

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>>50875076
The 00s were when information technology started really changing people's everyday lives in ways that would have seemed absurd even in the 90s. Consequently, the view of the future became one of transparent technology. Clean lines and unblemished surfaces, but technology was always there waiting in the wings to augment the human without any significant effort on the human's part.

Later in the decade, as systems began surpassing the capacity for a single human to understand the entirety of, ideas started turning toward a certain fear of the unknown. Terrors no longer came from the inky blackness of beyond, but the complex unknowable depths within mankind's own systems. Some stories were the same as the pulp from the 50s and 60s with robot uprisings, but frequently they were supplanted by normal human antagonists using systems in unfamiliar and unexpected ways.

>>50873399
The best example that comes to mind for the 40s is I, Robot. There, it seemed like the future of space was mostly cut-and-dry practical. Granted, it was filtered through the lens of its protagonists, but humans were traveling to Mercury for research purposes and to asteroids for mining projects. Robots are used for labor and computing and they require maintenance and troubleshooting in that regard. I can see how that viewpoint could be informed by WWII and its aftermath, what with all the rationing and the rather stark outlook on things.