Science & Tech Quote by Elizabeth Moon

A quiet indictment hides inside Moon's mild phrasing. "Relatively few" sounds like a librarian's statistic, but it's a writer calling out a genre habit: speculative fiction loves to imagine everything except what it means to age. The sentence lands because it's almost bland. No grand moral, no manifestos, just a simple inventory of absence - and that restraint makes the gap feel undeniable.

Moon's intent is partly craft, partly politics. At the level of storytelling, fantasy and sci-fi default to protagonists who can believably sprint, fight, apprentice, and transform on schedule. Youth is convenient: it allows the classic bildungsroman arc, sells "chosen one" urgency, and dodges the slower, more ambivalent stakes of later life. But Moon is also flagging how marketing and cultural taste collude to treat older people as side characters: mentors, monarchs, crones, punchlines, obstacles. They exist to explain the world or block the hero, not to want things themselves.

The subtext is sharper: if speculative fiction is supposed to be the literature of possibility, why does it replicate one of mainstream culture's most predictable blind spots? Old age is framed as post-plot, as if desire, risk, sexuality, reinvention, and agency expire at 60. Moon's own career (and her military background) reinforces the point: competence doesn't magically vanish with wrinkles; it often concentrates.

Context matters, too. Moon rose in a field long dominated by youthful heroes and masculine adventure templates, where "relatability" was code for a narrow demographic. Her observation isn't just about representation; it's about imaginative cowardice disguised as genre convention.