From comments I feel like the mention of elderly protagonists sucked all the air out of the room even though I was talking about a pretty specific technical aspect of older protagonists in worldbuilding, rather than fictional representation of older people in general? 
Maybe it's understandable given that elderly protagonists are something of a rarity especially in genre lit spaces; I did in fact mention that aspect in an earlier draft of the op but cut that part out because it was already too long. In the earlier draft I mentioned "The Day Before the Revolution" by Ursula K. Le Guin and "Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200" by R.S.A Garcia https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/ as the few other examples I know of, both of them superb science fiction short stories with older female protagonists where the viewpoint characters' knowledge of how the world used to be serves to ease readers into aspects of the world.
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What I find fascinating about an older character PoV in spec fic is that an elderly character is both a fish out of and very much in the water at the same time: They've been around a while and have seen more of the world than a lot of younger characters, but the world they're so familiar with can also seem strange because so much has changed since their own youth. In that sense all older characters who have lived through rapid social and material change are science-fiction protagonists, like older people in the real world. This push and pull between the familiar and unfamiliar puts older characters in a unique situation as both worldbuilding vectors and as characters, and is particularly powerful when they're in protagonist roles able to act from that combination of familiarity and "otherworldly" disorientation.
Also mildly freaked out because modern Uganda & Tanzania share a border, yet 2,000 miles is more than 3 times the entire length of the Korean peninsula. Africa is truly on a different scale omg, people you have been lied to by Mercatur all your lives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU
From comments I feel like the mention of elderly protagonists sucked all the air out of the room even though I was talking about a pretty specific technical aspect of older protagonists in worldbuilding, rather than fictional representation of older people in general? Maybe it's understandable given that elderly protagonists are something of a rarity especially in genre lit spaces; I did in fact mention that aspect in an earlier draft of the op but cut that part out because it was already too long. In the earlier draft I mentioned "The Day Before the Revolution" by Ursula K. Le Guin and "Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200" by R.S.A Garcia https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/ as the few other examples I know of, both of them superb science fiction short stories with older female protagonists where the viewpoint characters' knowledge of how the world used to be serves to ease readers into aspects of the world.
