I was watching old episodes of Star Trek: Voyager – because I’m something of a trekkie, and I’m feeling yucky and therefore doing absolutely nothing productive with my time. And there was an episode called “Workforce” from season 7, in which the crew of the starship are all abducted by a society with a labor shortage. They’re brainwashed and put to work. There were some scenery tableaux in that episode that seemed to evoke, in my mind at least, the aesthetic of one of the singularly most influential children’s books in my own past: Bill Peet’s Wump World.
Here’s a scene from the episode.
Here’s a scene from the old children’s classic that, while obviously not identical, bears some striking resemblance at least in my mind.
You might call it the “Pollutian Aesthetic” – since the Wump World has been taken over by the Pollutians from the Planet Pollutus. In the Star Trek episode, there’s a dash of Orwell’s 1984 (or successor aesthetics like the movie V, for example), too. You might call it retro-futuristic dystopianism.
