History Main / UsedFuture

* Philip K. Dick's "DoAndroidsDreamOfElectricSheep" has "kipple" - the accumulation of society's junk and litter, which seems to grow spontaneously whenever you're not looking. The Earth of the story had been largely abandoned in favor of space colonies, leaving many empty and unmaintained sections of the city to rot and accumulate random garbage. Appropriate, as it's the book that ''{{Film/Bladerunner}}'' is based on.

** The ''Normandy'' SR-2 has some of this in ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' thanks to being on the tail end of a refit when [[AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs all Hell broke loose]] on Earth. Several rooms have access panels missing, cables draped across the floor, et cetera. She's still perfectly spaceworthy, just not as pretty inside as she used to be.

** Somewhat subverted later in the series when shiny new white starships captained by kick-ass Rangers become the last hope for defeating the Big Bad's ships. Subverted to a truly unfortunate degree in the spin-off "Crusade."

* ''TheLongestJourney'' and ''{{Dreamfall}}'' have this with Stark, the world of science. While the wealthy live in shiny high-rises and travel in {{Flying Car}}s, the majority of humanity lives in lower levels with slums, ghettos, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking art schools]]. It's no wonder that, when April first ravels to Arcadia, the magical world stuck in MedievalStasis, she's awed by its beauty and simplicity (being an art student helps). Naturally, she decides to stay in Arcadia after the events of the game. Things get only worse in Stark after that. The Collapse results in society going back to older technology, and interstellar space flight is no longer a possibility (not that life in the colonies was a picnic). Notably, things in Arcadia have also taken a turn for the worse but for a different reason.

* Apparently Dan O'Bannon had a thing for working on films involving this sort of thing. Prior to doing special effects work for ''Franchise/StarWars'' and writing the screenplay for ''Film/{{Alien}}'', he was involved with the production of a low-budget college short-turned-feature called DarkStar which centered around a four guys who have been stuck in deep space for 20 years on a spaceship which is riddled with malfunctions since nobody wants to do any maintenance. This includes but is not limited to the sleeping quarters being blown away (forcing the men to sleep on improvised mattresses in a food storage room), storage areas self-destructing on their own, a faulty seat which has already killed the original commander, and an elevator that moves up and down at random (with an emergency hatch too small for a person to fit through and an emergency phone that is offline). Incidentally, Dan O'Bannon partially adapted his script for ''Film/{{Alien}}'' from this film, making it OlderThanTheyThink.

* Apparently Dan O'Bannon had a thing for working on films involving this sort of thing. Prior to doing special effects work for StarWars and writing the screenplay for Film/{{Alien}}, he was involved with the production of a low-budget college short-turned-feature called DarkStar which centered around a four guys who have been stuck in deep space for 20 years on a spaceship which is riddled with malfunctions since nobody wants to do any maintenance. This includes but is not limited to the sleeping quarters being blown away (forcing the men to sleep on improvised mattresses in a food storage room), storage areas self-destructing on their own, a faulty seat which has already killed the original commander, and an elevator that moves up and down at random (with an emergency hatch too small for a person to fit through and an emergency phone that is offline). Incidentally, Dan O'Bannon partially adapted his script for {{Alien}} from this film, making it OlderThanTheyThink.
* ''Film/BladeRunner'': Decorators just overdid their aversion of ShinyLookingSpaceships with [[CyberpunkWithAChanceOfRain cloudy, polluted skies]], graffiti everywhere and trash blowing in the wind.
** Ridley Scott actually said "The future is not new. It's old".
*** And because of that it looks amazing

* One would be hard-pressed to call the ''USG Ishimura'' of VideoGame/DeadSpace a "[[NoOshaCompliance nice workplace]]", even if one ignores the ravenous, [[NightmareFuel nightmarish]] [[OurZombiesAreDifferent Necromorphs]].

** Depending on the section, the Sprawl of VideoGame/DeadSpace2 averts and plays this straight. Sections like the residence halls, Church of [[ReligionOfEvil Unitology]], shopping center, and school are well maintained, while sections like the mining decks are quite reminiscent of the Ishimura.
** VideoGame/DeadSpace3 continues the theme, being set on a series of spaceships as well as a colony on an alien planet that are all over 200 years old. One wonders how much of the Franchise/DeadSpace universe ''isn't'' covered in rust.

* ''Film/BladeRunner'' is the TropeCodifier. Decorators just overdid their aversion of ShinyLookingSpaceships with [[CyberpunkWithAChanceOfRain cloudy, polluted skies]], graffiti everywhere and trash blowing in the wind.

** The ''Falcon'' is an easy justified example, being that she was already approximately seventy years old in the OT. Lucas has said he intentionally sought a rough-and-ready "hot rod" aesthetic for the Falcon. Later [[StarWarsExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]] sources reveal that the ''Falcon'' was actually made by taking a pair of totaled YT-1300 freighters and assembling the intact parts into a single YT-1300.

** It's worth noting that Scott [[WordOfGod specifically cites]] the used future look of ''Star Wars'' as the major influence for the look of ''Alien'', so GeorgeLucas really is the granddaddy of this trope.
*** Not quite. Dan O'Bannon's script for ''Alien'' was actually inspired by DarkStar, which came out three years earlier. In the movie, four men have been voyaging through space for 20 years and their spaceship is slowly falling apart around them, with various malfunctions happening all over. Among other things the commander was killed by a faulty circuit in his chair and at least one storage area self-destructed, the sleeping quarters were badly damaged and now the crew have to sleep in the food storage locker, a bomb keeps receiving false orders to detonate, and a faulty elevator which has a tendency to move up and down randomly with an emergency phone that's out of order. The presence of an alien resembling a beach ball and the (extremely bored) crew suffering from SpaceMadness certainly don't help.

*** Inside, maybe. On the outside it remains as pristine as the shiniest of ShinyLookingSpaceships, except for the time it got graffitied. [[spoiler:And that was really done by Rose Tyler using the time vortex anyway]]. Travelling anywhere in it does seem to clean the outside, as seen in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E10VincentAndTheDoctor Vincent And The Doctor]], where a layer of posters the TARDIS has acquired is burnt away after a short journey.

** In a possible subversion, even Free Traders are major investments. It is worth a guess that even on a small ship, the bridge(if not the hold) will look like a library or an office, rather then like the classic {{Firefly}} or Millenium Falcon style.

* Of course ''Franchise/StarWars'' more or less defines this trope, where every ship is covered with dings and scratches and epitomized by the ''Millennium Falcon'', which looks like it is almost [[WhatAPieceOfJunk ready to fall apart]]. This extends to the [[SpaceIsNoisy sound design]] as well, apparently GeorgeLucas' instructions were that he wanted to hear every loose bolt in the engines. This said, the ships used by the Empire often look a bit more swish. It helps that the Rebel ships are held together with space duct tape and TheForce, while the Galactic Empire has the full might of...[[CaptainObvious a galactic empire]] behind its military. The Rebels are still able to gain access to real formidable ships that can rival the Empires Star Destroyers, thanks to the support of many worlds who are also against the Empire (Such as the Mon Calamari Cruisers, some of the few capital ships the rebels are able to acquire brand-new) but most of their smaller vessels and fighters are obsolete or cast-off craft that no other galactic navy wanted.

Interestingly, portraying this in CG effects is actually more difficult, but sometimes the audience won't accept things [[DirtForcefield not looking dirty enough]]. Which can be ironic because spaceship exteriors are actually perpetually shiny in real life (due to the scarcity of dirt, grime and oxidizing agents in space)--unless they have to endure high-velocity atmospheric reentry.

Actually justified, if ships use a layered-ablative-standoff-armor setup like the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield Whipple Shield]] which takes advantage of the tendency of small objects moving at comically-high speeds to shatter on impact, and lets the first armor layer shatter the junk (which makes a very tidy hole through the outer layer), and the second layer absorbs the (much less dangerous) spray of components without having any holes in it. This would have a scarred and pitted look after a while, and if the ship's owner didn't have money to replace sections of the shield as necessary, it could be this trope to a T.

* The ''HalfLife'' games showed a bit of this in the old, abandoned segments of Black Mesa but really cranked this trope up in the second game which simply screams {{cyberpunk}} and {{dystopia}}. Every lab belonging to the Resistance is full of visibly old mainframes and CRT monitors, despite the fact that the second game is supposed to take place somewhere in the 2020s. Justified in that there's a VichyEarth situation going on so there's no way to get your hands on shiny, brand-new technology without stealing it from the [[TheEmpire Combine]].

** ''Literature/TheManWhoSoldTheMoon'', 1951

* Philip K. Dick's "DoAndroidsDream" has "kipple" - the accumulation of society's junk and litter, which seems to grow spontaneously whenever you're not looking. The Earth of the story had been largely abandoned in favor of space colonies, leaving many empty and unmaintained sections of the city to rot and accumulate random garbage. Appropriate, as it's the book that ''{{Film/Bladerunner}}'' is based on.

* Philip K. Dick's "DoAndroidsDream" has "kipple" - the accumulation of society's junk and litter, which seems to grow spontaneously whenever you're not looking. The Earth of the story had been largely abandoned in favor of space colonies, leaving many empty and unmaintained sections of the city to rot and accumulate random garbage.

* Any media featuring SpaceTruckers is almost guaranteed to use this trope.

** The ''Falcon'' is an easy justified example, being that she was already approximately seventy years old in the OT. Lucas has said he intentionally sought a rough-and-ready "hot rod" aesthetic for the Falcon.

* The ''Revelation Space'' universe from AlastairReynolds. The first ship described is about 3-4 kilometers long and has ''5 people'' running it. Vast swathes of it are described as "flooded with coolant...others were infested with rogue janitor-rats...patrolled by defense drogues which had gone berserk...filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad." Amazingly, ''it gets worse''.

Shows on the other end of the SlidingScaleOfShinyVersusGritty treat the future as a place where real people live, and where spaceships look dirty, dingy, and used, like heavy equipment that one might find at a lonely truck stop in the middle of the night right now. The ships are old junk heaps run on a shoestring by hard-bitten characters on the edge, seemingly held together with two pieces of string, chewing gum, and the will of the Holy Spirit -- the SF equivalent of the struggling FilmNoir private eye, in other words. This is the UsedFuture, and it's home to renegades, regular working stiffs, and anyone on the "cynical" end of the SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism. Think of it as DieselPunk [[AC:InSpace!]]

* The vehicle in ''OutlawStar'' deteriorates gradually from [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] to UsedFuture, mainly because the characters do so much traveling in it.

* The ''Nostromo'' in Ridley Scott's ''Film/{{Alien}}'' set the benchmark for all UsedFuture depictions to come. This extends to the occupation of the protagonists--they're ''truck drivers'', hardly a glamorous job.

* While the ''Discovery'' itself is [[ShinyLookingSpaceships bright and clean]] in ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'', in the sequel ''[[TwoThousandTen 2010]]'' it's decidedly less so, with dust having collected on it thanks to hanging in orbit around Io for 9 years without any humans to maintain it. The ''Alexi Leonov'' doesn't look particularly shiny, either.

* Almost all the ships in ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'', except the ''Andromeda Ascendant'' herself, which was a time-shifted relic of a bygone era of cleanliness. The series is really about injecting old-fashioned heroics into the UsedFuture.
* ''[[Series/BabylonFive Babylon 5]]'' went so far as to prominently feature a station that had acquired UsedFuture levels of grime ''before it opened''.

* In the ''Series/{{CSI}}'' episode about ''Star Trek'' fans -- all right, ''Astro Quest'' fans -- the sample clip of the proposed DarkerAndEdgier revival of the old sci-fi program has a definite UsedFuture look to the set, costumes, and characters.

* ''{{Traveller}}'' has both. There are [[CoolShip CoolShips]] which are for instance private yachts or large ships of, The [[SpaceNavy Imperial Navy]] or a Megacorporation. And then there are [[UsedFuture Used Ships]] which are meat and potatoes jobs like Free Traders, the IISS or the Sworld Worlder's [[SpacePolice Confederation Patrol]].

** It gets worse by the time of ''Gears of War 3'' where humanity has lost all of its cities and all humans now exist as self-defending tribes. Everything has predictably become dirtier and more desperate. Less UsedFuture and more ScavengerWorld.

* One would be hard-pressed to call the ''USG Ishimura'' of VideoGame/DeadSpace a "nice workplace", even if one ignores the ravenous, [[NightmareFuel nightmarish]] [[OurZombiesAreDifferent Necromorphs]].

** The ''Falcon'' is an easy justified example, being that she was already approximately seventy years old in the OT.

* ''Film/{{Outland}}'' This underrated 1981 film depicts a mining "colony" on Io that is as dirty, cramped, overcrowded and "used" as the crummiest oil-rig of today. The hero and the leading lady are middle-aged, unattractive (by movie standards) and cynical. The bad guys are not aliens or galactic emperors, but drug-dealers, corrupt cops and venal businessmen. The weapons are shotguns and rifles. It takes a year for spaceships to travel from Earth to Io.

* OlderThanRadio: Long before Heinlein, E. M. Forster had written a science fiction short story called ''The Machine Stops'' about a future civilization that has grown dependent upon automation. (When the titular machine deteriorates and dies, so does the civilization.) The story itself was published in ''1909''.
** You kidding? H. G. Wells beat Forster to the punch by 14 years with ''TheTimeMachine''. I think we're all familiar with the plot, but everything in the distant future is older than the dust that covers it and the inhabitants make use of the technology only out of habit or instinct.

* Anime/MobileSuitGundamThe08thMSTeam has a bunch of Gundam Ground Types that are basically a pile of spare-parts for the original Gundam that are put together and armed with a couple of large rifles. Maintenance is done quite frequently, to the extent that when a Gundam isn't being piloted, someone is doing maintenance on it, to make sure they work. In fact, the main character arrives at the EFF-base, while his Gundam is being tuned. Most repairs are done simply by taking functional parts from other Mobile Suits and stuffing them on the Gundams, which results in one of the 08th MS Team pilots being referred to as "GM-head" because her Gundam's head gets replaced by that of a mass-produced GM's head after the original head was shot off. On the Zeon side, we got to see a single Zaku Tank, which is basically a Zaku torso with arms and head, stuffed on top of a Magella-class attack tank. We never saw it in action, but one can only assume it was a make-shift repair to a Zaku II that had lost its legs in battle.

* In ComocBook/FearAgent it is hard to keep your ship and jetpack shiny when you are the last survivor of a monster-hunting group from Texas with alcohol problems.

* In ''Fear Agent'' it is hard to keep your ship and jetpack shiny when you are the last survivor of monster-hunting group from Texas with alcohol problems.