AUR: for those of you who have finished reading (major spoiler)

[Fresno Bob]

Cliff wrote: "Dave wrote: "I was actually surprised at the end and thought [spoilers removed]"

My mind went even darker than that and expected the last chapter to discuss
[spoilers removed]

But I also felt th..."

I was expecting this outcome as well

[Skip]

I really didn't get the feeling was anti-colonization as much as it felt like a long-form answer to all the people that want to colonize now. Exploration is hard, but it is nothing compared to colonization. Living planets are likely biological death-traps, where any planet able to support without much effort is likely to have life that will prove inimical to humans. Dead planets can be teraformed, but only over very long periods of time. Keeping people alive long enough to make either habitable is not an easy proposition, even if you can get them there.

The end didn't bother me. (view spoiler)[If you want to show the changes to the earth you can't stop with the ship's death. And killing Freya doesn't do anything for that character. She's always tried to survive. Giving her a chance at life is all Devi or Ship would have wanted. (hide spoiler)]

[Rob]

Rob wrote: "I cared more about the ship than I did about most of the characters. I found the end of story unsatisfying, simply because it just cut off.

It made sense in the narrative, but still left me unfulf..."

Honestly, I found it masterful in that it "cut of" mid-sentence while still wrapping up the character arc. We have an awesome epic monologue that seems to be building to a eureka moment, we have straightforward, unqualified expressions of joy-- but in the final moment, we have an admission of complexity. Of no easy answers. Of messiness even in endings.

I got teary eyed too

[Andrew]

Dave wrote: "I was actually surprised at the end and thought [spoilers removed]"

I expected the same ending for that final scene with Freya, and was relieved that it worked out differently. I think I needed some glimmer of hope by then.

And like many others, I was upset by ship's fate, but given the tone of the book I was too exhausted to cry.

[Noomninam]

Adam wrote: "This was a first for me in that it was a Science Fiction that suggested that we couldn't leave Earth. That any planet that we would find that managed to find an Earthish planet would already have a..."

Science-fiction that is even partly anti-science reminds me, and not in a complimentary way, of politicians who claim to be against politics. Interesting, as the latter are almost exclusively right-wingers, while KSR is without doubt a leftie!

[Rob]

...how is this anti-Science? Doing crap with tech =/= anti-science. Establishing some kind of ethical prescriptions about what we should do with tech =/= anti-science. The novel's cynicism is explicitly based on problems presented to us by science.

[Joanna Chaplin]

Rob Secundus wrote: "...how is this anti-Science? Doing crap with tech =/= anti-science. Establishing some kind of ethical prescriptions about what we should do with tech =/= anti-science. The novel's cynicism is expli..."

I think that because science (view spoiler)[ isn't enough to save us (hide spoiler)] it *feels* like anti-science. And because it contradicts some of what some of the prominent science educators are advocating these days.

[Rick]

Aside from some logical mistakes, I don't think it's anti-science to question the ease interstellar colonization. I think it's anti-wishful thinking. Anti-science fantasy. For all its faults, it's asking us to do precisely what science does - look at reality for what it is.

[Brendan]

I think it would be great if there was more science fiction warning against scientism in the way Aurora does.

[Beth]

I don't think it's anti-science any more than studies that show something has no effect are anti-science, even though the latter studies are much harder to get published. That's a known bias among scientists (so maybe also among SF fans?). A book that shows that even great scientists can't always save the day is just as much science fiction as one that has a scientist pulling a worm hole out of her butt to resolve all the problems. (I'm thinking of the Heinlein generation ship story that only involved generations on Earth).

I found the last chapter interesting enough to read, but it felt a bit tacked on. I had thought the main character and narrator was Ship, with Freya as a foil to show its development, so writing the last chapter from outside Ship's perspective kept me too busy wondering how I was reading this to pay attention to what was happening.

[Rob]

Brendan wrote: "I think it would be great if there was more science fiction warning against scientism in the way Aurora does."

w/r/t the reductionist scientism displayed in this thread/ criticized by KSR, The Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast just had a great episode where Manu Saadia talks about how technology=utopia thinking is typically flawed, and, like KSR, he believes that real progress needs to be made in policy: https://geeksguideshow.com/2016/05/19...

[John (Taloni)]

Heck, this idea has been around since Metropolis. Or even Frankenstein, depending on how you look at it. I suppose we could even go back to the ancient Greeks with Icarus as a warning about relying too much on technology, along with the obvious lesson about hubris.

[Brendan]

I don't agree with that interpretation of Aurora. The returners rely fully on technology. They put their complete faith in the AI to get them home safely, to keep them alive and even to take care of their bodily functions while they're in cryosleep. And it was shown that they were correct that they did so, they got home safely! So no, "don't rely too much on technology" is not the meaning I took away from the novel.

I view it as more challenging a certain view of naive optimism/techno-utopianism that is very specific to our current time-frame. I'll let Rob address the Icarus/Frankenstein interpretations, but i'm not sure i agree with those, either.

[Rick]

I view it as more challenging a certain view of naive optimism/techno-utopianism that is very specific to our current time-frame

This is the way I took its message too. Look, I *like* interstellar SF where we move across the galaxy and I even like some singularity fiction (Stross' Accelerando especially). But I realize as I read them that some of what these novels posit is impossible given current physics (FTL) and some is unlikely (strong AI). Some call these science fantasy but I've never liked that term because it's used pejoratively most of the time.... but they do have an element of fantasy to them. instead of "if magic were real" we have "If we could travel faster than light/upload our minds" but both kinds of fiction are dependent on reality being different than what we currently know.

However, there's a set of works that seem fine with saying (basically) Hey, we'll use up Earth, discard it or not care what happens to it and upload/hop an FTL ship/whatever. The conceit of these books is similar to post-apocalyptic fiction - the reader naturally tends to put themselves in the place of the people who hop the starship/upload (or in the case of post-apoc stuff, who survive the virus that kills everyone else).

In fact, much of this stuff is quasi-religious - we, the people who are in on The Truth (accepting of FTL/post-humanism, etc), will be Saved (survive the apocalypse/travel to the stars/upload our minds) and leave behind the mundane existence we have here ( go to heaven/live forever).

[Rob]

Yeah I'm with Brendan/Rick, especially the quasi-religious stuff. A lot of scientism involves magical thinking and messiah type stuff. And that does seem to in play in the novel-- hell, you can even view the generation ships as a kind of penance. Send these dudes off and we can continue destroying the Earth.

I'm not sure hubris is the best way of considering it, though it does play some role? But I definitely think Icarus is important to the novel. I didn't realize it until it was brought up, but yeah, a book where in the climax (view spoiler)[the protagonist literally dies by flying too close to the sun (hide spoiler)] is definitely in dialogue with that. I think the difference between the two is really important-- one is a myth about technology and pridefully assuming it can accomplish any task, the other (view spoiler)[ is a story in which a character is forced to fly close to the sun because the people that should have cared about it didn't bother to even listen until it was far too late (hide spoiler)]. So the tragedy isn't internal, like it is in Icarus. It's a fault-in-our-stars-not-in-ourselves situation. If the stars are people. Anyway. Technology could have saved them, if people had been paying attention. And the whole situation would have been avoided if they had known what a bad idea it was to use this technology in the first place, if they had paid attention to the science of island biology.

I think Frankenstein might be relevant too, though much more loosely, in the sense that both are about people creating inhuman forms of life, just in this case, an AI, and both are about parental issues. And in that the problems in Frankenstein come from Victor trying to run away from his problems, and the generation ships are similarly framed as trying to run away from the problems with the earth.

anyway the tldr is I think John, your comparisons are really really useful/insightful even if I do disagree with the point about over-reliance on technology broadly.

[Tobias]

These interpretations are really interesting, guys, thanks.

[Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth]

I didn't cry...it was just that some dust blew into my eye...honest!

Yeah, okay, it got to me. I had a lot of affection for the ship, and I kept hoping that it could be saved in some way.

I think I sort of felt the opposite about the book to a lot of people here though, because whilst it was sad in places, I thought it was rather positive - lots about sticking together and rebuilding and making what you have work for you instead of hoping something new will magically solve problems.

[Michele]

I really loved it too. I loved that it was the first time I read something that seemed realistic about dealing with life on another planet. And the idea that planets are dead or alive and that it makes a BIG difference which one they are. And then I loved how KSR pulled off a unique type of dystopia. He managed to create one contained in an interstellar spaceship. I called it a dystopia in a bottle.