I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention. My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?" Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.
It's got me thinking about age in SF stories. One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain. She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species. She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.
Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story. She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet. She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.
Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it. Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.
These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth. Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.
Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about. Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict? Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.
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