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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/9480
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Everything about our culture has changed so dramatically over the course of the last hundred years that it’s very hard to believe that we’d be the same as we are now in five hundred years.

This is an issue I have when writing and reading far future science fiction; it seems difficult to believe that people would talk the same as they do now, and hold to the same values and cultural norms. Yet if we don’t write that way then we remove our readers’ ability to connect to the characters and setting.

Obviously this is, in part, a question of suspension of belief. It’s not so unreasonable to use behaviours, values and even modes of speech, to create a connection between reader and characters. But how daft does it seem when confronted with punks straight out of the 80s in a dystopian future?

Is there a way that we can show believable change in humanity over time, while retaining enough recognisability to enable readers to connect? The closest I’ve seen is Joe Haldeman’s [Forever War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War_series) series, in which he uses people like us as outcasts in the future to bridge the gap. Are then any other examples that you’ve seen work well?

Original score: 6