The authors of this book offer a different reading of the retrofuturistic phenomenon, based on a simple intuition: the future only exists through the countless futures carried by past eras, and especially by our recent modernity, which may have tried more intensively than any other to take control of its own future. History is certainly much more populated than we imagine. The futures of the past, unrealized, persist at the heart of our time, drawing, through their lines of active futurism, a multitude of parallel histories. Do these futures exist less than others? Why not grant them an ontological dignity equal to that of the futures of the present? Easily navigating the most diverse fields (cinema, art, literature, architecture), the book develops its central hypothesis by playfully exploring the forms of a “floating” time woven with virtual futures, in a constant back-and-forth between concepts and figures. To rescue from the limbo of the past the imagined scenes of future life, Alain Bublex has turned to “retrotypes”: small-format photographs and scanned documents, quick sketches made in vector drawing; their approximate precision makes them resemble the light vignettes of decalcomania.