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What do you call this type of scifi? Could you also recommend some fiction with this vibe?
(literature.cafe)
Preferably books but anything will do.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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I questioned the other suggests that it was retrofuturism, as I had a different picture of what that meant, but apparently that is a very broad category that it seems most futuristic fiction seems to fall in if it has anything we think of in the picture, like flying vehicles or modernistic buildings. Everything from cyberpunk (both positive and dystopian) to steampunk to dieselpunk fall under the name. So I would maybe further narrow this to cyberpunk, aka Bladerunner/The Expanse type? Hard to say the environmental/social feel from just this picture.
Yeah, the image doesn't have a ton of genre references (at least not that I can identify) which I think is why responders defaulted to retrofuturism. Which is a really broad category: it's basically "what people from the past thought the future would be like" so any sci-fi that stays in the public consciousness long enough becomes some flavor of "retrofuturistic" by default.
I feel like cyberpunk, and all the *punk genres, tend to be darker and grimier than this picture though. This feels like someone fed a diffusion model "sci-fi landing pad" and it created this generic pastiche of scifi-ish buildings and aircraft, which is probably why it's hard to pin down: it's a synthetic average of a million stolen stories, sanded down to dust and reconstituted as a standard issue art wafer. Which is pretty cyberpunk dystopian, I think, so I guess I've come around to agreeing with you.
As presented it is the more cheery side of cyberpunk. The others tend to creep in older tech tells (steam or other), and the ship doesn't look very shiny and new, so there's a taste of used there, even if it's not very old, like Star Wars tech always feels, even in the brighter parts (like on Coruscant). Definitely AI source, a human artist would have put details like wear marks, debris on the ground, little things to give an age feel.
I'm actually working on figuring out my own scifi tech as background material for a novel, and AI is not create at coming up with things visually. I've hammered out the ideas in text, but now I'm trying to find ways like Blender to bring them to life to better see it.