Isn’t (the) protagonist the son of a WW2 vet?
He is around 30, the son of a WW2 vet who joined the army in 1944 at the age of sixteen and had him in late middle age.
It goes far beyond that. Every storyteller (or artist) has the potential to recast the myth as he or she sees fit. There is a general overall arc to the myth, but even that can change over time. Myths are incredibly fluid, and it’s the ones that have survived and remained popular that define the story as we generally know it. But if you get down and examine the individual stories and artistic representations of them, you find stuff that is downright weird.
case in point – If you’ve seen either of the movie versions of Jason and the Argonauts (the Harryhausen movie or the Hallmark made-for-TV one), you think that Jason defeated the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece in combat. If you read Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautika (or stories based on it) you know that Medea put the dragon to sleep, as in this vase painting
https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/M20.3.html
But then you come across things like this Kylix, showing Jason hanging from the serpent/dragon’s mouth and the fleece hanging on its tree while Athena looks on, and you ask “What the Hell?”
https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/M20.1.html
I can point to several other myths that give you the “what the hell?” treatment. You think you know the story of Pandora? Innocent and too-curious lady opens a box she shouldn’t and lets loose all the evils into the world? Think again. In several vase paintings she’s a woman emerging from the earth – the first woman. In some cases she’s a giant head. (See the works of Jane Ellen Harrison).
Phaethon? The guy who found out he was the son of Helios (or, in some later versions, Apollo) and, as proof, asks Dad for the keys to the car so he can drive the sun across the sky? Some old versions are completely different.
In Snow Crash, there is a “metaverse” that anyone can get to. It is mostly used by people who don’t want to spend much of their time in the “real world”. It is owned by a corporation. Despite what Zuckerberg thinks, we’re far from any such thing. Snow Crash can’t be taken as an accurate prediction of the future. Lots of it has already happened, lots hasn’t happened, lots will never happen, and lots will only happen quite a while from now if it ever happens. Maybe that’s typical of most science fiction that’s set in a future that isn’t that far off.
Science fiction writers, as a rule, don’t try to made accurate predictions - only plausible ones (to varying degrees of “plausible”).
That’s exactly what I think.
I think a lot of science fiction is not based on trying to predict things so much as examining the relationship between people and science/technology (a much more interesting proposition, IMO). That, of course, involves extrapolating from present-day situations.
So when I read Fahrenheit 451 and see people with interactive television screens that take up whole walls, I’m not prepared to say that Ray Bradbury was trying to predict what he was describing, but I do think that one way or another, the idea got into his head that people would want such a thing if it could be made available. And how would that affect our lives?
Maybe in 1953 it would have been some woo-woo fantasy kind of thing WAY OFF in the distant future, but today? At this point, it’s probably little more than a matter of getting the cost down low enough to make mass marketing economically feasible.
I think science fiction, like every other form of literature, is mostly about examining the relationship between people and other people. But that, I think, is another thread.
I think it was Ray Bradbury (or possibly Robert Bloch) who rose in the middle of a panel on SF predictions in a SF convention to say “I don’t write to predict the future! I write to prevent it!”.
Yes, and another character we meet (the Don of Cosa Nostra Pizza) was a Vietnam vet. So that puts another limit on how late the book could be set.
I’ve heard that it was Bradbury who said that the aim of science fiction was to prevent the future
Fine, but who in power listens to novelists?
As for Snow Crash, the USA has not quite snow-crashed yet, but is that thanks to prophetic warnings? As for walking around glued to a computer, in the novel that was not considered cool (especially since some people used bulky gear like VR goggles), but who knows what etiquette is these days.
Okay, I can totally picture our very near future: pedestrians with VR goggles are common, and everyone’s gotten used to pulling their children clear of their blind lumbering path. And holding them back if they’re about to step into traffic.
Short version. Ted Sturgeon wrote in 1977 that Bradbury had said that. And Frank Herbert gets attributed with something like that in 1978. Bradbury himself has no definitive quote until a 1982 article.
Fritz Leiber’s gonzo story,“The Creature from Cleveland Depths,” from the December 1962 Galaxy, has what are essentially smartphones be grafted to bodies so that humans are in such constant communication with one another that they form a collective mind. It’s what used to be called black humor when black meant darkly satiric. Nobody ever listened to black humorists, even though they were almost always right in their critiques of culture.
This reminds me of a comic book from 2011 called NONPLAYER by Nate Simpson where people in the future wear VR goggles that overlays a virtual reality fantasy world over the real world in real time as you’re walking around.
Wasn’t augmented reality already a real thing by 2011?
We’ve reached the point where more time has past between now and “Airplane” (42 years) than between “Airplane” and “The Wizard of Oz” (41 years)
I have a 20-year-old nephew, and it recently occurred to me that “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is as old to him as “Casablanca” is to me. (21 years before we were each born.)