Demolition Man had the “oldies” radio station that only played 20th-century ad jingles.
Villain? Let’s look at just what E. E. “Doc” Smith, alias Kimball Kinnison, alias Sybly Whyte actually wrote about me.
“Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…”
I think too many readers assume I was the bad guy there, based on that short paragraph. Cynthia and I had been dating for a while at the time of the ‘incident’, and she was in urgent need of my rescue. We have been happily settled down together ever since.
I’m also a bit cheesed that Kinnison went on to describe our relationship as an ‘affair’ as we were both unattached when we met and during our dating period. Also, he described Cynthia as “beautiful but dumb”. He was correct about the former but not the latter.
Cite: Children of the Lens by E. E. "Doc" Smith, from Project Gutenberg Canada
Refer to chapter 3 “Kinnison writes a Space Opera”
ETA: At least in chapter 27 he said it was a good Space Opera.
There’s a somewhat isolated star cluster whose inhabitants circa 4022 AD have a classical music tradition derived from dimly remembered Earth’s Country & Western….I think it’s part of Weber’s ‘Honorverse’ but I can’t find it just now…time for an epic re-read?
That reminds me of the Martians from the excellent webcomic A Miracle of Science; they are highly diverse in their outfits. The Martian co-protagonist wears a black dress and glitter in her hair, her father dresses a lot like the Tom Baker version of the Doctor, another looks a lot like some supervillain, and so on. Which is especially interesting since while still individuals, they are all linked together as a collective mind (one of the very few benevolent ones in fiction).
Grayson, from the Honor Harrington series.
In John Brunner’s novel Shockwave Rider, there is a detailed description of a computer game called Fencing. I read the book in college and thought the game description was complete enough that I could try writing a program to implement it, but I got stymied because (at that time) I couldn’t come up with an algorithm to determine whether a given point is inside a given triangle.
There is an impressively long list of fictional games on Wikipedia.
In Logan’s Run (the novel, not the movie), the narrator mentions sculptures made of something called “fireglass” which is apparently visually impressive, but corrosive and dangerous to work with. Many of the sculptures are unfinished, because the artist died at 21 and took the secret with him.
Later, at a party, Logan meets a popular poet, and we get to read the kind of dreck that passes for literature in the world of the future.
Later still, Logan and Jessica encounter a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, with robots portraying the soldiers.
They also have a martial arts tradition descended from the swordplay in The Seven Samurai, and unlike most off-Earth civilizations, their ancestors made sure to include waffle irons in their limited mass budget when they emigrated.
They have similar old-fashioned taste in music. Like how the crew of Deep Space Nine enjoyed nothing so much as hanging out in a holographic version of a 1960s Vegas-style nightclub.
Or playing a baseball game, dressed as one would in the late 20th Century.
They also play baseball on Grayson. One of the teams is sponsored by Honor Harrington.
Captain Proton on ST:Voyager counts I think.
Jake Sisko wrote (will write) a novel and a book of short stories IIRC.
Brian
I appreciate all the suggestions, but how many of these are actually depicted within their respective works, and how many are just talked about? Luke and Obi-Wan don’t just reminisce about some cool band that was playing when they hired Han Solo, we in the audience get to see and hear them.
I guess I’m looking for examples like that, and whether they actually feel sufficiently futuristic and alien, or whether they might as well scream out the time and place they were made.
Maybe it’s a fool’s errand. I’m in no position to say there won’t be hippies hijacking starships in the 23rd century and singing about brotherhood. And maybe the people who make genre shows have decided the same thing. They know they can’t predict future tastes, so they fall back on having Capt. Picard portray a 40s gumshoe on the holodeck.
Yeah, it’s not a million miles away from Line Dancing or The Macarena really.
They mention them, but never quote them. The quote I was thinking of was written by Harlan Ellison, and perhaps few others could come up with something that at least sounds like it would be remembered.
As for games, there were video games in Clarke’s “The City and the Stars” from the early 1950s. I was amazed when I reread it, since the last time I had read it was before video games. Or at least home ones.
Carper’s Law: The Future is Never About the Future. It Is Always About Today.
The Flame-Thrower Electric Guitar was actually pretty cool in that last Mad Max movie.
Futurama has the brilliantly terrible All My Circuits, which demonstrates that crappy daytime soap opera is still alive, well and popular in the 31st century.
Futurama also has Extreme Toddler Wrestling.
And science fiction is about people, not science.