Atompunk

The novel is set in an atompunk, alternate history.

In fact, there was a fair amount of stuff around in the 60s and 70s that can only be explained as cross-dimensional leakage from an Atompunk universe.

Perfect "atompunk" feel – reactors with nervous engineers and analog controls.

For the Legion, we're looking at 20th century futures rather than 19th. Analogies with steampunk might be "dieselpunk", "atompunk", or "rocketpunk" – but any Legion of Super-Heroes worthy of the name seems to be as far from the "punk" aspect as it's possible to get.

According to a mailing list from the Netherlands, Atompunk is devoted to the cultural period (mostly of the United States) of between 1945 to 1965. While the moniker hasn't become a part of our country's vernacular yet (though I'm sure some of you already started using it ages ago), it sounds just annoyingly catchy enough to warrant a New York Times trend piece in about eight years.

Atompunk covers the pre-digital period of 1945–1965, including mid-century Modernism, the Atomic Age and Space Age. Throw Roger Thornhill's suits in this basket, and everything ever worn on Mad Men. This takes us right up to the mid '60s, when the fictional worlds of yesterday abut the real worlds you grew up in.

You keep imagining someone 20 years from now reading The Peripheral the way that we read Neuromancer today, perplexed at the now-unfathomable ubiquity of cassettes and modems. We laugh at the past or mine it for influence – think of steampunk, atompunk, dieselpunk, and the million other microgenres based on the incongruity of old societies and future tech – but someday, the future is going to do the same to us.

Additionally, while [Sebastian] Faulks aspires to write as [Ian] Fleming, he takes care to increase the serving of action, in fact including some interesting bits of atompunk—a nuclear-powered ekranoplan, Vulcan bombers.