Vintage space age illustrations

Here's a lovely little gallery of space age illustrations, perfect for collaging into Christmas cards or other crafty projects. Most of these come from the superb Modern Mechanix blog (a bottomless, never-ending, priceless trove of fantastic scans from vintage pulps), but there are a smattering from elsewhere as well.

45 Vintage ‘Space Age’ Illustrations (Thanks, Samantha!)

(Image: Traffic of the Future (1959) by Klaus Bürgle, as seen in Veloopity's Flickr stream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Art and Design • Happy Mutants • Old school

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Darrenontheweb

Geez…I remember growing up and thinking that we would all be flying around in space cars and jet packs by the year 2000.
ninjasuperspy

Ah, before the days of impact bumpers. I’m sure that the Road Safety people would have something to say about the rocket car on the right. And it would probably go something like “You’ll have to put some Nerf on those to avoid driving around with three pedestrians impaled on each one.”
Ugly Canuck

It has been said before, but “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
zabork

Haha… looks like Boston’s Tobin Bridge area pre-Big Dig.
koona

I remember 59 well, and this was indeed an image verging on fantasy, of the future. No cloverleafs or overpasses in my world then.

Well it all came to pass, the car designs look a little earlier than the roads, but it passes.

MANY people at that time and since were making ACCURATE PREDICTIONS as to just where this cancerous growth economy and focus on the individual member of the HIVE would lead to.

The economic and environmental events of 2009 and onwards are bound to make folks try to re-invent thier own wheel as usual. WHY can’t people LEARN FROM HISTORY?
Factran

It reminds me of http://www.paleofuture.com/ , which you may already know.
shrocket

“Smokey Yunick’s Tips for Your Car”!
Johnny Cat

These all made me giggle profusely, especially the one depicting water polo, but wtf is up with that last one? Sure, that could happen to me, but why?
mokudan

That’s funny…the example posted directly on boingboing looks to me like a not-too-far-fetched pastiche of some sights here in Oakland, around what we call the “Macarthur Maze”…
ManhattanManhunter

Oh – so THAT is where the Jetsons ended up! Finally – an answer.
woid

I love that it’s the “future,” but the cars are all from the year the illustration was made. That red car in the left-hand lane looks like a 1959 Dodge, Plymouth, or DeSoto.
imipak

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=chesley%20bonestell
mattymatt

When I see these kinds of prediction-illustrations, I’m always struck by how everyone’s inside their own private vehicle, always en route but never arriving or engaging in activity together.

In that respect, it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the Internet.
teknokracy

This somehow reminds me of the Usborne Book of the Future, published some point in the 60s or 70s, with a very quaint outlook on human occupation of space. For some reason, whoever owns Goatse.cx has decided to host it.
snagglepuss

Funny how almost all of the people on the “new” vehicles are racing somebody else. Only the folks parking the things in their futuristic garages seem to have any leisure time…