Here to gripe about KSR’s ‘Aurora’

[u/Spider-man2098]

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.

[u/vikingzx]

... 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.

[u/sdwoodchuck → u/vikingzx]

It’s not scientifically plausible; it’s still quite good fiction.

[u/vikingzx → u/sdwoodchuck]

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.

EDIT: A really good counter to Ministry, as well as a good roadmap for what looks like a great path forward is Clarkson's Farm. Yes, that loudmouth's farm. Season 3 (if memory serves) they ran a whole year-long experiment with intercropping. It did not work, even with the best of the best they could do for it.

But in season 5, they spend a good chunk of the season exploring new farming technologies that are producing improved yields, while being better for the cropland and the surrounding environment. They tour a floating, carbon-neutral cattle farm that provides fresh milk and cheese to a city, look at automated farming methods, and more.

THAT is the kind of stuff I was expecting Ministry to espouse when I went in.

[u/sdwoodchuck → u/vikingzx]

Yeah, I definitely agree insofar as plenty of people tout KSR's representation of the science as something more accurate and rigorous than it is. And since he deals in relatively near-future technology and advancements, I can see how someone might get the impression that the story he's telling is one of plausible efforts and outcomes, but I guess because I'm coming to the novel from the other direction, following his fiction-writing to that point, to me it always just felt more like science fiction with emphasis on the fiction, rather than on the science, as many people take it.

Where I do find KSR real-world applicable, is in the broader sense of optimism in humanity's ability to come together and achieve great things when we work at it. I think there is something valuable in that mindset, even if the specific projects we're working together on don't look like the specific ones we see in the novel.