Comparison Between 'Long Way Home And The Pedestrian'
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Different science fiction authors portray what they believe the future will hold in their writings. While some writers depict how technology could be advanced for the worse, making the future look not as bright as people believe, others show happy times and extraordinary advancements in technology for the better. The short fictional stories “Long Way Home”, and “The Pedestrian”, both illustrate different views of the future but they have one thing in common; the people are not happy. In “The Pedestrian”, everybody is isolated and hypnotized into following orders, causing freedom to make their own choices severely limited. In “Long Way Home” the people have freedom of choice but these choices cause unhappiness to the main character. Future…show more content… Waugh is a story about a father and his son. It starts out with the father, Mr. Hanson, reminiscing on his son’s early life and what has led him to the point he is at now. “Where had it begun? With the telescope Ann and I had given him for his eighth birthday four years before her death?...Is that when the stars began enticing him onward…?” Mr. Hanson’s son is going to be a space traveler and is happy with the path he has chosen. Only single men can take this profession because “faster than light drive” has not been invented yet, meaning that time travels slower. 10 years in space could translate to 100 years on Earth. Mr. Hanson is at first overcome by grief and a sense of loss, but then realizes that he has made the right choice. “Today, I have opened this room once more, ‘Hanson and Son’ still leans against a wall, but I realize now, as i should have then, that I was right to let him go.” Waugh portrayed this future in a sense of technological development for the better, but loss within family is still great no matter the…show more content… “Long Way Home” is the best candidate of the future because it expresses the future in the bitter truth, where there will still be sad endings and life won’t be perfect, but advances in technology will not consume people’s lives. If you think about what technology is used for today it very easily narrows down to one simple idea; improve the daily lives of people. From machines to e-books, technology has definitely advanced for the better in lives. People don’t have to work as hard, probability of injury on the job decreases, and health measures are taken more into perspective. As demonstrated in “Long Way Home”, the space program has ameliorated over the years into something America can be proud of. Leonard David, in the article "Will Commercial Space Travel Blast Off in 2014?" states: "We believe this moment will represent a major shift in humanity's relationship with space - the moment when the space environment becomes significantly more accessible to new people, new uses and new science." This company, Virgin Galactic, plans to take humanity to the only place that humans have not, and probably will not, completely explore; space. If this idea is accomplished, space will not seem as such an impossible accessory These thoughts and intentions are all thanks to plain human curiosity. It will be human curiosity that will