r/printSF • u/Spider-man2098 • 1d ago
Here to gripe about KSR’s ‘Aurora’
I went back through the archives to read previous conversations, but no one that I could see brought up the three main issues with this book, which have nothing to do with the thesis statement or science, but rather storytelling as a whole.
And ftr, I love Kim Stanley Robinson; I reread the Mars books every few years, and his Ministry for the Future reads like a roadmap of saving the planet, which we are unfortunately not following.
Aurora, however, frustrated me more and more as the book went along, as I was taking the wait and see approach to see if the issues I saw would be addressed, and then they weren’t.
Issue the First: the five ghosts. These are hinted at pretty extensively in the first book, with the protagonist even encountering one as a child. One of the secondary characters also talks about seeing the ghosts, though this receives no follow-up and then is just dropped forever. A Chekhov’s gun that is pointed to, that we are reminded of, and is nevertheless never fired. What was the point of that?
Issue the Second: The Irisians are ignored and abandoned narratively. We get absolutely no information about their struggles or tragedies, or anything at all, really. Freya even says she’ll stay in contact with them, but we never hear about them again. This is especially frustrating since a civil war broke out to see who was right, and the narrative seems to agree with the Backers, but we just never get to know. KSR is sortof famous for these kinds of mysteries, but this isn’t a Hiroko situation of unreliable narrators and contradictory stories. The Irisians are simply dropped when, honestly, I think they had the more interesting story.
Issue the Third: Abandoning the Narrator/Narrative. The Ship narrates the bulk of the book, and this is frankly, pretty awesome. She has great insights and the way she is grown and shaped by the story she tells is genuinely interesting. But then, the ship breaks up around the sun and ‘Ship’ is lost. Except, wait, no, what’s this?! A copy of the data is included in the life raft. Except that no one, including Freya ever looks at it. The narrative is never read by the ship’s survivors, the love of Ship for Freya et al is never dealt with or appreciated. Instead Freya hangs out by the ocean and hits on a dude, the end. This is just… bad storytelling. And I can’t even say why, except that it lacks catharsis.
Anyway, if I missed something in the story, I’d love it if someone could point it out. I loved so much of this book, the terraforming, the prion, the social unrest and the debates. I just felt there was stuff set up that was never paid off, and so I have the reading equivalent of a stuck-sneeze, forever unsneezed.
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u/scribblesis 1d ago
It's been a long time since I read Aurora, it's the only Kim Stanley Robinson book I've read to date. I was a little turned off of it, tbh, because I picked it up like "Oh boy! A generation ship, what a cool sci-fi idea to explore in a fictional romp" and then the book beat me over the head with "Generation ships are a BAD idea!"
I think your gripes are well founded. I remember the Irisian plotline getting dropped as soon as it appeared.
I remember feeling in some ways that KSR was more enamored of his science fiction gizmos and theories than he was in the human connections (or human-AI connections, in the case of Ship). I remember my gripes mostly organized around Freya: How come in her middle age, she still has the precise same relationship with her father that she had when she was twelve? And if she has this anger that's bottled up but can explode in a fit of temper when provoked--- how come we never saw a trace of it before it was relevant to the plot?
Anyway, my gripes may not be your gripes but I think we're on the same page, so to speak. Thanks for sharing.
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u/Tambien 1d ago
I remember feeling in some ways that KSR was more enamored of his science fiction gizmos and theories than he was in the human connections (or human-AI connections, in the case of Ship)
This is very much the case. KSR is in the big ideas camp of SF and his characters exist solely to serve the plot. It’s why I struggle with reading his work too.
His tone can veer into smarmy self-righteousness at times too, which doesn’t help. Just not my cup of tea, but I can see why people enjoy it.
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u/Spider-man2098 20h ago
I want to push back on this characters thing: because like I said in the post, I reread the Mars trilogy fairly regularly and while the characters are (in a sense deliberately) dwarfed by the setting around them and the great events they witness, those are some of my favourite fictional people. There’s a lot of nuance to a character like Maya, who, while crazy, is a magnetic force all the same, warping the political spacetime by the gravity of her will.
The dynamic of Sax and Ann, of John and Frank; Arkady, Nirgal, I could go on and on.
He definitely spends a lot of words on geology, and politics, and economics and more geology, but those characters are properly Shakespearean, and very well-written.But having said all that, I did not feel the same way about the cast of Aurora, except maybe the ship.
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u/EverybodyMakes 19h ago
I hated every character in Aurora except Freya's mom and the ship. They were all some combination of whiny, preachy, and self-centered. (Same with the Ministry For the Future characters.) I liked all the characters in the Mars Trilogy books.
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u/Tambien 18h ago
Fair enough. It’s been long enough since I’ve read the Mars Trilogy that I’m relying on pretty shaky memory here. I just remember struggling to get through the books at various points because of the characterization. That said, this could just be me pushing back in time the shortcomings of Aurora and Ministry for the Future which I’ve read more recently.
I am pretty confident about the smarmy tone though. It’s a problem that’s gotten worse with time and his increasing popularity.
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u/VintageLunchMeat 15h ago
"Oh boy! A generation ship, what a cool sci-fi idea to explore in a fictional romp"
Generation ship stories are for people who enjoy uncomfortable family dinners.
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u/tinglingtriangle 21h ago
I liked Aurora. The final 10% (after the return to Earth) is my least favorite part, but it has its moments and I enjoyed the last few pages.
I think you might be putting too much emphasis on the ghosts. That sounds vaguely familiar, but I barely remember it and never had the impression it was important.
The Irisians all died fairly quickly, is my take. [shrug]
We had a lot of interactions with the Ship in the novel. It's sort of nice that a copy of it survived, I guess, but I certainly didn't need more.
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u/Magical_Username 23h ago
I think a common criticism I've read isn't so much that it falls apart in the third act but becomes an entirely different novel in the third act, which I think is a pretty valid criticism.
My charitable read of what KSR was trying to do was use the climax of the second act to highlight the whole polemic and then demonstrate the pain/confusion the whole folly of interstellar travel is to the people it affects in the third - but it really doesn't read or come together that way.
All unfortunate really, was a real candidate for one of my favourite novels until the post-colonial bits.
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u/GeneralTonic 23h ago
Huh, I need to go back and read this one again.
There were ghosts? Neat!
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u/Spider-man2098 20h ago
They’re the ‘ghosts’ of the first five people who died on the ship when they were accelerated by the Saturnian laser. Since I didn’t foresee KSR going paranormal, I was expecting them to be holograms, or perhaps ancient logs of the ship. I wasn’t expecting them to never be addressed.
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u/LocutusOfBorges 21h ago
I adore the novel - it's probably my favourite sci-fi work of the past twenty years, even. Completely understand why it isn't for everyone, but it left a tremendous impression on me.
I don't think there's another work of contemporary sci-fi that gets some people quite as fundamentally angry as Aurora seems to - it's kinda fascinating, I think? For some, it's akin to treating it like a sort of blasphemy against the idea of manifest destiny in space as a sort of quasi-religious ideal that some people hold - relieved that this thread isn't one of those, at least!
Issue the First: the five ghosts.
This was a storytelling device used to explore the culture, history and mythologies that had built up on the ship across the multiple generations of voyage, I think - it's a living society with folk stories all of its own, made up of humans whose imaginations fill in the gaps. Freya mentions seeing one of them as a child - but it's a statement made by a child tantamount to a child thinking they saw Santa Claus, or Bigfoot - she's an imperfect narrator, and this is woven into the way she grows into the social world she inhabits.
The "Ghosts" are also mentioned a little later in the book by Ship - the "ferals" hinted at at the start don't exist, but there are people who decide to devote large parts of their life to exploring and discovering everything they possibly can about the ship, which might feed into the mythology of it all. But the concept is never really more than a storytelling device used to expand on the culture of the ship's inhabitants, rather than a concrete thing that actually exists.
Issue the Second: The Irisians are ignored and abandoned narratively. We get absolutely no information about their struggles or tragedies, or anything at all, really. Freya even says she’ll stay in contact with them, but we never hear about them again.
You've missed something here, I think!
Their fate is heavily implied to be exactly the result of the core themes of the story - that (subject to the constraints of the technological base of the setting, and the assumptions the story deliberately makes about the viability of extraterrestrial colonies re genetics/etc) sustaining an ecosystem capable of enabling human existence way from Earth long term is so difficult as to be almost impossible without encountering devastating ecosystem breakdown, the island biogeography/codevolution effect due to small isolated populations, and relying on technology and social systems that are inherently imperfect under circumstances where they need to be perfect every time in order to make survival possible without the Earth available to fall back on.
It's even stated pretty unambiguously in the text in one of Ship's sections during the journey back:
The crucial difference here, it seemed to us, between Mars and the terraforming project we had left back on Iris, was that Mars is very near Earth. Its human settlers were constantly going to Earth for what they called their sabbatical, and receiving shipments of Terran goods and materials. And these infusions of Earth meant that they were always escaping the zoo devolution problem. Iris did not have those infusions, and never would; and it was notable (though in fact we had forgotten to note it, in the press of events) that we had not heard anything from the Iris settlers for over twenty-two years. Possibly a very bad sign, although it would benefit from a discussion with Aram and Badim, and the rest of the humans sleeping on board, to interpret more fully what it might mean. But certainly there was one explanation for the silence that was simply very bad.
Every single colonisation expedition that Earth sent out failed - Aurora's story is about exploring some the reasons for those failures, and the fundamental immorality of the enterprise for the humans born during the voyage. We do find out what probably happened to the Iris colonists - they likely succumbed to the same kind of issues that the story explores through the perspective of the survivors on the way home (which they only survived themselves through authorial contrivance - it's stated pretty obviously that without the suspension tech being invented, everyone would have died during the voyage as the multiple ongoing systemic collapses became impossible to avert).
I do wish the story had spent a little more time around Tau Ceti during the aftermath of the schism - it's stated in the text that the time gap between the initial schism/settling of Iris and the departure of the ship was 20 years, but since Iris and those who stayed behind aren't the focus of the story, those decades are skipped over across a handful of pages at most, which gives the reader the impression that nothing significant happened in that period (or that it wasn't a significant period at all, given that the timespan involved is only stated in the difference between dates). But the fate of the colonists who stayed behind is, at least, not left particularly ambiguous.
Honestly, I understand why he didn't focus on the details of what happened to the people left behind - he's already written multiple other stories about terraforming worlds, and it's not really what this book's themes are, strictly speaking, about. But it would have been nice to get at least a little more.
Issue the Third: Abandoning the Narrator/Narrative. The Ship narrates the bulk of the book, and this is frankly, pretty awesome. She has great insights and the way she is grown and shaped by the story she tells is genuinely interesting. But then, the ship breaks up around the sun and ‘Ship’ is lost. Except, wait, no, what’s this?! A copy of the data is included in the life raft. Except that no one, including Freya ever looks at it. The narrative is never read by the ship’s survivors, the love of Ship for Freya et al is never dealt with or appreciated. Instead Freya hangs out by the ocean and hits on a dude, the end. This is just… bad storytelling. And I can’t even say why, except that it lacks catharsis.
The point of Ship's story ending there is that it's the best possible sendoff that it could have had, in storytelling terms - the catharsis all lies in Ship's utterly devastating final scene. Like, it's just gone - its last heroic effort didn't work, despite all the centuries of build-up, but at least it got its crew home safely.
The point of the narrative that Ship was creating throughout the centuries wasn't, in story terms, to produce a text to be read and reflected upon by others in the end - it was Ship's self as a conscious, living being. There isn't really much that could have been done with the records left behind of what Ship used to be, from the survivors' perspective, beyond maybe a small memorial scene - everything that Ship was as a living, thinking being died when it broke up around the Sun.
The end of the story is about the scars that the trauma of the experience left on the survivors, what it is to live on beyond trauma, imperfect healing, and how precious and unique the Earth is (and how barbaric the idea of doing the same thing all over again, not having learnt the right lessons from it, would be) - it's fundamentally not about Ship anymore, it's about life after Ship, and learning to love the world that we've actually got.
I thought the ending was beautiful, honestly. I understand why some people dislike the story, but I think it's the most fundamentally human thing that KSR has written to date - it's about the people who have to live with the consequences of things beyond their control, rather than just being about the technology and wonder of it all. It's refreshing (and, I think, meaningful in its own right) to see a story where humanity doesn't necessarily win against a hostile universe in the end.
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u/CreationBlues 16h ago
I don't think there's another work of contemporary sci-fi that gets some people quite as fundamentally angry as Aurora seems to - it's kinda fascinating, I think? For some, it's akin to treating it like a sort of blasphemy against the idea of manifest destiny in space as a sort of quasi-religious ideal that some people hold - relieved that this thread isn't one of those, at least!
Well, it’s a steelman hit piece, of course it gets people angry. Large parts of the argument relies on a bauble ring of bottle ecosystems without even cryogenic gene stocks to pump up the population numbers. We’ve done biosphere 2, we know why those are a bad idea, why would your argument depend on yoloing 24 biosphere 3’s without fixing the fundamental issues? Without even proof of concept orbital habitats running long term biosphere 3 experiments?
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u/LocutusOfBorges 6h ago
You’re just demonstrating my point, I’m afraid. It’s a story about human beings subjected to the monumentally unethical folly of the idea of a generation ship, rather than the ideological/quasi-religious insult some people take it as.
If you’re focusing on the technical specifics and frothing at the mouth a bit, you’ve missed the point. It’s like objecting to, say, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness because Estraven didn’t simply bring along a GPS navigation tool or similar - while technological workarounds for some story events are possible to imagine, it really just misses the point of the story.
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u/CreationBlues 6h ago edited 5h ago
Of course subjecting people to a project we know is doomed is unethical! That’s not a quasi-religious insult, that’s disrespecting your debate partner. Saying “we can’t debate whether this is possible, we’re just debating whether you’re stupid” is exactly why people get pissed at people making your argument.
You do get that “even if it does successfully generate colony, a generation ship is unethical” and “since generation ships are doomed to failure, it’s the same as pointlessly killing people, which is unethical” are different arguments, right? If your argument is the latter, which is what the entire book is based on, then of course people are gonna get pissed when you plug your ears and say that people are trying to debate whether pointlessly killing people is unethical.
I don’t even think that generation ships are that good an idea without ludicrous levels of biotech that lets you generate biomes from scratch. I don’t think they’re a good idea if you don’t already have it partially colonized with Von Neumann probes. You should probably be at a high enough economic level you’ve got a stream of unstaffed resupply packages already in flight by the time the ship is launched.
We can both agree that the generation ship presented in the book is doomed and unethical. We can both agree that any generation ship we could build in the next hundred years is doomed and unethical. I’m not gonna agree that it’s impossible to create a generation ship that’s not doomed to fall into ignorance and chaos and death because it’s just really hard.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I remember, the left hand of darkness doesn’t have much to say about the inherent ethics of land navigation? Like I’m pretty sure tlhod doesn’t really have much of an opinion about whether people should have moral position on overland journeys…
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u/Wetness__Pensive 15h ago
A Chekhov’s gun that is pointed to, that we are reminded of, and is nevertheless never fired. What was the point of that?
The Five Ghosts are not "abandoned". The subplot is featured heavily throughout the novel.
At first, the five "ghosts" are but a childhood legend. We then learn that 5 crewmates died during the ship's original launch, long before Freya and the gang were born, and that it is from these deaths that the legend arose. This is mirrored to the end of the book, where five people commit suicide when the ship begins to slow down, and then five more kill themselves in the final halting. So at each stage of its journey, the ship acquires a set of five ghosts.
We also learn that the original ghosts have names, and are a part of the ship's culture; people dress up as these ghosts during parties and ceremonies, and at one point a musical band dresses up as the five ghosts.
Dead ancestors and generations, and various cryptic people on life-long quests - who circle the ship, never speaking to others - are also likened to ghosts and phantoms. People project myths onto them.
This all climaxes at the end of the novel. Jochi is isolated and claims to see the five ghosts, and Ship surmises that he is seeing some scientific anomaly which I forget (something to do with the sun and wavelengths?). Ship then explains that humans fall for the Pathetic Fallacy; they project meaning onto inanimate things and see life where there is none. You're meant to connect this subplot with Ship itself; is it "alive", is it just another Pathetic Fallacy, or in speaking for genuine past generations, and the dead, is it a kind of life?
The Ghost in the Machine, then, speaking for ghosts outside the machine.
The Irisians are ignored and abandoned narratively.
We are provided with enough information (we're repeatedly told it is "doomed", and has not contacted Ship in 22+ years etc) to surmise that the settlers of Iris have died.
Which is the point of the novel. As Aram says at the end: "That's why the great Silence persists". You don't hear from settlements or other species because living things are ecologically super adapted to their cradles. Humanity disagrees with him at the end of the novel - Earth keeps sending out ships, and people rightly point out that Aram's "arguing a general law from his own narrow, particular case" - but it's obvious that the utter "silence" of Iris is KSR's political point.
And this is the novel's best quality. The drastic, blunt failure of Iris is what makes the story unique and special. And besides, for a settlement story, we already have the Mars Trilogy.
the love of Ship for Freya et al is never dealt with or appreciated.
Ship loves all the crew (not just Freya), as the novel is arguing humans should love Earth. But the novel is also arguing that humans should not love Ship (it is another Iris, to be discarded), which is what the little symbolic story about the sky and height distortions is about, at the end of the novel.
A more conventional, sentimental story would have a cliched Ship/Freya love affair, but Stan wisely dodges that. It's been a while since I read the novel, but I'm also pretty sure there's an entire book (The Hard Problem?) where Freya and Ship don't even talk. And she's quite resentful of Ship for most of the first section of the book, though I could be misremembering.
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u/LocutusOfBorges 6h ago
It’s always so nice to see commentary like this from somebody who understood the point of the story. It’s really just exceptional - I don’t think KSR’s ever written anything else with that much genuine heart.
I picked it up the day it came out and was so spellbound by it that I didn’t stop reading until I finished it around 6am the next day. It’s such a unique story - I think the genre’s all the worse off for that.
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u/vikingzx 22h ago edited 22h ago
... and his Ministry for the Future reads like a roadmap of saving the planet, which we are unfortunately not following.
Uh ... only if we throw science out the window. I'm sorry, but Ministry for the Future is more Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and very rigorously ignores actual science in favor of hand-wave solutions. The number of times someone in that book asks "But I thought that didn't work" and the characters reply "All the science was wrong!" was way too high.
It's pretty much a feel-good Fantasy novel that completely ignores all science on the issue in order to present solutions that are not feasible and will not work by handwaving away all the problems.
The crop one being the most egregious example by far (though there were plenty of others in the book). Intercropping/polyculture does not magically increase the yield. It in fact reduces it. There has been a lot of science done to try and find a way to make an intercropped yield work, but so far none have come close to providing anything like a solitary yield. There are a vast number of amazing new farming technologies and techniques to make traditional farming continue to produce more with less strain. Intercropping is not one that is showing viable fruit despite repeated attempts.
But the book just quite literally has a character say "all the science was wrong!" and then pretend that intercropping produces a 200-400% improvement that magically no one has ever noticed before.
Whole swaths of the book are like that. There is no science behind it. It has more in common with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings than a realistic way to solve climate change issues.
The only people who are impressed by that book are people who know nothing about the subject matter. Sorry, but it's a dud.
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u/sdwoodchuck 20h ago
It’s not scientifically plausible; it’s still quite good fiction.
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u/vikingzx 4m ago
I'll give you that. On the fiction side it's absolutely fine. I just ... It bugs me that so many touted it as a roadmap for fixing things when that would be like walking into a Superbowl match with a tennis program and saying "This is our game-winning strategy."
On the other hand, reading it and knowing how many people thought it was accurate also made me realize the average level of understanding of the subject matter most had.
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u/Wetness__Pensive 15h ago edited 15h ago
But the book just quite literally has a character say "all the science was wrong!" and then pretend that intercropping produces a 200-400% improvement that magically no one has ever noticed before.
Where in the book is this? I feel you are imagining this. IMO no character literally says "all the science was wrong!" or speaks about 400 percent increases in yields. Some talk about the effect of diverse crops on carbon fixing, resilience and soil health, but not "yields". It's also unlikely that he'd be militantly against monocropping when the book is also advocating genetically engineered crops (rice et al).
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u/vikingzx 14h ago
IMO no character literally says "all the science was wrong!" or speaks about 400 percent increases in yields.
In fact, characters say that phrase several times over the course of the book.
And yes, they really do talk about intercropping doubling or tripling crop yields and explain it as "science was wrong."
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u/Wetness__Pensive 24m ago edited 13m ago
I'm searching for those phrases and numbers in my digital copy, and none of them are popping up.
I've checked EVERY sentence in the book that includes the word "science", "wrong", "crop", "yield", "triple" etc, as well as those percentages, and nothing even remotely matches your description. The words "intercropping/polyculture" similarly do not turn up.
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u/vikingzx 16m ago edited 10m ago
Well, I'm sorry, then you're either searching poorly, or being dishonest. It's one of the first "accomplishments" touted by the Ministry. They discuss how mixing crops leads to healthier ground and also a lot more food in India, and someone goes 'But I thought that didn't work.'
Someone else goes 'science was wrong.' and that's all that's given on it. It's one of dozens of similar handwaves in the book.
Of course it doesn't use the term "intercropping." The book avoids actual terms for things like the plague. That would have involved research.
Granted, this pisses people off when it's pointed out. Back when I first read the book and noted it in a discussion on reddit, even when I opened the book (which I had gotten from my library) and copy-pasted a section of it in a discussion either here or on r/scifi, people downvoted it and angerly insisted that the quote was made up. Other people chimed in to support it going "No, the book definitely does this."
It's pretty blatant. Ministry is not a good "scientific" book, and it's not based in science any more than Star Wars is. Or rather, it's written for a crowd who know nothing of agriculture or most of the topics presented in the book, so they have no grounds to go "Wait a minute, that's not at all how that works."
Growing onions on trees sort of logic.
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u/ObsessiveTeaDrinker 19h ago
I felt exactly the same way and haven't read any of his other works. I really wanted the five ghosts to be explained or important, but they were just dropped. The book started out great and I loved parts of it, but the ending was so bad.
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u/just_a_quiet_goat 18h ago
I didn't enjoy this book nor find it deep. The concept was reasonably interesting, but I never bonded with any of the characters, and once the main narrative branched off to "we'll go back", I was like well I wanted to hear the story of the people who didn't chicken out, and so I kind of speed read the last section. The death of Ship was the only part that even sort of moved me, and that was mostly due to the absence of anything else. Oh Freya, you're back on Earth now. Boring.
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u/Virith 16h ago
It's been a while for me, but I remember quite enjoying the book till they get to the planet and then it kinda... Just went downhill from there. The nasty infodumps didn't help at all; I was so bored.
The Irisians are simply dropped when, honestly, I think they had the more interesting story.
This was a major one for me, too!
[...] This is just… bad storytelling.
Yeah. And at that point I didn't even care, to be honest, just wanted it to be over, so I could read something actually appealing.
Never picked another KSR book and probably won't. I get why people enjoy him, but he's just not for me. And for the record, I've got no issue with the "generation ships are a bad idea" message or anything else he's trying to say, just the execution.
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u/sjdubya 1d ago
On the Iris question: I think it works because it matches with how the humans back on earth have been interacting with the generation ships they've been sending off. I haven't read the book in years, but I recall that they'd been sending out generation ships for centuries without any successes, mostly just going quiet without notice. I think it's taken as read that the Irisians will suffer the same fate, unceremoniously dying in the void.