When I was in my early teens, I spent many hours staring in goggle-eyed fascination at the illustrations in “science magazines”, like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Science and Mechanics, that depicted future tech.
The illustrators created scenes of potential space missions and spacecraft, both actually proposed and wildly imaginative, fantastic airships, monorails, undersea cities and other views of a promised idealized tech-wonderland future.
Apparently my adolescent counterparts in then-Soviet Russia were doing the same, as this wonderful Russian blog is showing us by posting vintage Russian science and space illustration from the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Like entertainment concept artists, these illustrators are showing us things that don’t exist, but might; in many cases, giving us and “X-ray” view with cutaways.
Even though most of the more fanciful future tech didn’t come to be (I’m still waiting for my personal rocket pack and driveway gyrocopter), fascination with this kind of illustration remains strong.
[Via ModernMecanix by way of BoingBoing]
