The new world is different from the old world, differently.

The new world is not different from the old world in the sense that places differ from each other only within the framework of a general culture. Usually with distance comes difference, even within small countries. But, countries of the new world, especially in northern Anglo America, differ from the old world differently. They are not merely the same culture continued, with gradual differences appearing as a result of differences in geography and the accumulation of history. They are different in the way they have accumulated (by immigration, mostly), and via the violent overlays of very different theretofore barely related cultures (Europe, Africa, indigenous America). Although the old world is also a composted overlaying of empires and different peoples, the time frame was different longer. In the new world, mixtures of places and cultures happened so rapidly that a permanent rift between the different components has been maintained in memory, and the links to the old world have become abstracted, idealized.

There are parts of Latin America, for example, where cultural difference to Spain seems proportional to the distance involved (and the ocean in between, which in some ways can act as a preserver of culture rather than a diluter), where it feels as if Spain continues with a slight hick up, as if on the other side of a mountain range. But in most areas of the Anglo America, the umbilical cord of the "mother country" has been severed, it seems. Or, put differently, the newer region is not a continuation of the mother country, but an offspring of it, it is different in some fundamental way. The Anglo Americas relate to Europe (and other relatives) on the basis of rupture, not continuation, nostalgia as opposed to habit.

The Anglo American fascination with science fiction is more a documentation of this ruptured colonial/parental relationship, than a coded cold-war narrative. The US and Canada are more like extra-planetary outposts, than intra-planetary extensions. In Latin America, on the other hand, the dominance of catholic iconography (taking the place of the north's science fiction obsession) comes across as less a link to god than to Europe and the past. It seems, that in the northern hemisphere the distance of the ocean acts as an insulator, in the southern hemisphere it acts as a conductor.