Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The oldest SF trope is the travelogue.
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People have always (for whatever reason) wanted to hear stories about adventurers who travel to strange lands and meet strange people. This was as true in the time of the Odyssey as it was when Stanley's books about exploring Africa were popular.
The problem is that we mostly explored everything and met most of the strange people on earth by 1900. Which was just in time for certain genres of SF to come along and pick up the slack by journeying to strange new worlds, etc.
SF is a lot of different things...but one part of it is simply an opportunity for someone to travel to a strange land and interact with the strange autochthones and observe their curious customs. Or vice versa.