Cosmic Nostalgia

Finding Magnetic Storm after forty years

Some things find you at exactly the right moment.

A few weeks ago, a book fell back into my life that I hadn't seen in forty years. Magnetic Storm by Roger Dean. If you don't know Roger Dean, you might know his work without realising it , he's the artist behind the Yes album covers, those extraordinary landscapes of floating rocks, bioluminescent skies, and structures that look grown rather than built. Impossible worlds rendered with such tenderness that they feel more real than photographs.

I grew up with this book. It lived in our house because Roger Dean was a family friend, which meant I had access to something most kids didn't , not just the images, but the conversation around them. The idea that you could build a visual world entirely from imagination, and that imagination was a serious, rigorous, worthwhile thing to spend your life on.

When the book came back to me, something clicked.

The Enclosers: recurring childhood dreams of vast beings

Long before I had language for it, I had the dreams.

I still have them occasionally. I'm in a landscape , usually open, usually vast , and there are presences. Not threatening exactly, but enormous. Beings or structures so large they exist at the edge of comprehension. The feeling in the dream is not fear. It's awe. A kind of reverent smallness, the way you might feel standing at the edge of the ocean at night.

I've always called them the Enclosers, because that's what they do , they enclose the world I'm in. They are the edges of something. And they have always felt, in the logic of dreams, like they were the point. Like the landscape existed to make sense of them.

I have never seen this image anywhere else. Until Roger Dean.

Those floating continents, those organic towers, those skies , they carry the same emotional frequency as my dreams. The vastness without menace. The alien rendered as home. I don't think it's coincidence. I think some aesthetics reach into something shared, some register of the imagination we don't have good words for.

The aesthetic I've been reaching for: robots in meadows and crescent moons

If you look at the things I'm drawn to creating , the images I keep returning to, the visual language I reach for when I'm building anything , there's a pattern.

Robots in meadows. Crescent moons over industrial landscapes. Vintage technology surrounded by wildflowers. The handmade and the cosmic sitting next to each other without irony.

It's not steampunk. It's not retrofuturism exactly, though it borrows from it. It's not fantasy. It's something quieter and stranger. It's the feeling that technology, at its best, should feel like it belongs in the world , not dominating it, not replacing it, but woven into it. That the future and the pastoral aren't opposites. That wonder is the appropriate response to both a crescent moon and a circuit board.

I've been reaching for this for years without being able to name it.

Naming it: cosmic nostalgia

Then a book I hadn't seen in forty years fell back into my life , Magnetic Storm by Roger Dean , and suddenly the two halves of this aesthetic clicked into place. The nostalgia: Roger Dean, Tomorrow's World, childhood, the longing for how the future used to feel. The cosmic: the vast, the spacey, the otherworldly, the sense of something bigger than ordinary life. Put them together and you get what I've been drawn to creating all along. I'm coining it: cosmic nostalgia.

It's the longing for a future that felt handmade, strange, and alive. A future that hadn't been risk-assessed. A future that still had texture.

Tomorrow's World and the age of wonder , when the future was exciting

I watched Tomorrow's World as a child with the specific kind of excitement that I now associate almost exclusively with children. The fizzing, forward-leaning certainty that what was coming next was going to be wonderful.

Flying cars. Space stations. Robots that would do the washing up. Technology presented not as a threat to manage but as a gift arriving in stages. The future was somewhere you actually wanted to go.

There was a whole aesthetic around this. The fonts. The colour palettes. The way presenters held new gadgets with genuine reverence. The implicit message that humans were on their way somewhere, and that somewhere was good.

I haven't grown out of that feeling. I refuse to.

Why the wonder got replaced by dread

Somewhere between then and now, we swapped wonder for dread. And I think we've started to accept that as just normal. Mature, even. Like excitement about the future was something you were supposed to grow out of, like a belief in Father Christmas.

Now a new technology lands and the first thing we do is threat-assess it. What will it take? Who does it replace? What do we lose? The discourse around AI is almost entirely structured around fear , and I'm going to write more about who benefits from that fear in another post, because I think it's worth examining carefully.

But for now: when did the future stop being exciting? And more importantly, why did we let it?

I don't think it's inevitable. I think it's a choice. And I think the aesthetic we choose to build in , the visual and emotional register we operate in , is part of how we resist it.

Creating or imitating: the aesthetic as a position, not just a style

Cosmic nostalgia isn't a mood board. It's a position.

When I build something that looks like this , warm, strange, handmade, slightly otherworldly , I'm making an argument. I'm saying: the future can feel like something worth arriving at. I'm saying: wonder is not naivety. I'm saying: the past knew something about the future that we've forgotten, and we should go back and get it.

This matters for anyone building anything. The aesthetic you choose is not decoration. It's a statement about what you believe. Vintage technology in a wildflower meadow says something very different from a sleek white interface with no edges. Both are arguments. Both are positions. The question is whether you're making yours consciously.

I am. Cosmic nostalgia is my argument. It's the visual equivalent of saying: I still think the future is somewhere worth going.

And AI: why cosmic nostalgia proves what technology should and shouldn't do

Here's where this circles back to something practical.

I use AI every day. I've built tools with it. I think it's remarkable and I'm not remotely afraid of it , but I am interested in making sure we use it correctly. And cosmic nostalgia, as an aesthetic, is actually a pretty good test case for what AI should and shouldn't do.

AI cannot have a childhood dream. It cannot find a forty-year-old book and feel something click into place. It cannot spend years reaching for an aesthetic it doesn't yet have words for. It cannot coin a term that comes from a lived experience of the gap between imagination and language.

What AI can do is help me get that aesthetic out into the world. It can help me write faster, schedule consistently, find the right image, maintain a presence when I'm deep in the building. It removes the wrapper, the admin, the executive function drain , and leaves me with the actual creative work, which is the only part that was ever mine.

That's the correct relationship. Not AI instead of the human, but AI in service of the human. The robots in the meadow aren't replacing the meadow. They're there because someone with an imagination put them there.

Cosmic nostalgia is mine. The future it points toward , handmade, strange, alive, still full of wonder , is one I'm still trying to build.

I hope you'll come with me.