The ethos of science fiction.

I've been reading Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash", a cyberspace-related thing involving pentecostalism, and one of the more popular science fiction novels of the past 20 years, and it's been making me think a lot about the ethos of science fiction. For many people who enjoy science fiction, they enjoy thinking about "the big ideas of life", which is tied into science fiction formulas -- you take some element of the world we live in and extrapolate it megafold (e.g. government surveillance) or take a world like ours but makes something radically different (e.g. robots who can think but not feel like us have taken or are taking over) and see what observations pan out. With "Snow Crash", though, since it touches on something I know about, the whole thing strikes me as pretty shallow... It's like whoo-whee, religion is a virus, get it? Fuck you.

On that note, I think this type of "shallowly thinking the big ideas" thing is tied into the type of people who read science fiction. They were all beaten up in high school, so what they yearn for -- and who isn't a person who thinks that they're somehow better than everyone else -- is to think these big ideas and through that be better than the people who used to beat them up. Thus, you find the corresponding lack of deep characters or any empathy in science fiction novels -- everyone is either a snarky person who knows what the heck is going on (=the reader), or a flat character of the world (=everyone else). I wonder if science fiction readers ever grow up and read George Eliot. If they don't, they should.