So one of the things I've noticed throughout this anthology is that in the stories where people leave Earth to form new colonies or civilizations they end up making their own bizarre cultures separate from those on Earth. In Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, for example, the people who live on Dione live in what seems like a tree house village and every knick knack in their houses seems to in some way be related to space imagery (plates with craters, vases shaped like moons). It seems like the people raised in space are always curious about Earth people, and that in some cases feel a little superior. I've also noticed that these stories tend to follow someone from Earth who is experiencing space from an outsiders point of view.
Why is that? Is it to give us a lead to follow and someone to relate to? Are the authors acknowledging how weird these worlds are that they've created and assuming that a reader could only begin to understand them from an outside perspective?
I think it's mostly a way of re-imagining life today. With the ability in fiction to blast off to another planet or move 5 million years into the future, the characters and the reader can observe our world through a different lens. It's hard to gain perspective when you're in the middle of living, so a lot of sci-fi goes as far out as possible to make connections between what we know and what could be.
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