For me it just isn’t plausible. Basically, you need to co-evolve with your food. It seems unlikely that an alien life would some how evole to be a perfect predator on humans without ever actually encountering them.

KSR leaves an out with the ending. He’s not saying humans will give up star flight outright, but the road is a lot rockier than first thought. My sense is that he thinks it is probably rockier than is worth pursuing, but I also suspect that he believes that people will have to figure that out for themselves. In the…

KSR has not really undermined his previous ideas of colonizing the solar system, but with Aurora he has posed a serious question to moving beyond the solar system. The big thing that’s changed for him since the Mars trilogy is his estimation of the length of time necessary for terraforming to work. With the possible…

I think you’re missing the whole point of the book. The problems of the travelers are all due to their ancestors. These are not rugged travelers filled with ecstatic wonder and promise. These characters have been stuck in a totalitarian society for generations and discover suddenly that everything they and their…

Full Disclosure: KSR is my favorite author, so I’m predisposed to his work. His writing hits me in the sweet spot.

I was furious at times reading this book because I wanted it to be a description of a new beginning. I wanted to read something that matched my current enthusiasm for solar system exploration as well as the fictional successes from KSR’s previous work. Halfway through, I almost put the book down because things didn’t…

I liked it while I was reading it, I liked the big ideas and the hard science, and I liked the characters for the most part. But looking back on it, it is just sooo depressing. We will enver inherit the stars, we shouldn’t even try, we are doomed to fail. To paraphrase a recent tag line, Humanity was born on Earth and…

I am a big KSR fan. For me probably the best thing he has written since Years of Rice and Salt. This book haunted me, stayed around for days and weeks after finishing it. it is a fantastic exploration of the ethics of what we do with our own planet as much as sending people off to colonise others, and manages to throw…

Agree with WhatGravitas and the sense of disappointment and wonder Tauromachy describes. it is a book that articulates how hard this is, that there is no guarantee that these wonderful flash drives we upload our personalities on to are going to happen. Also, Ship’s AI is way more than Siri, and becomes one of the most…

In many ways, though, that is the point of the book. How do you know that we are going to have perfect nanobes and terraforming microchines and digital minds the size of thumbnails?

This book blew up my dreams and I kinda greatful for it.