## [Q] What does this subreddit think of 'Aurora' by Kim Stanley Robinson?

* Author: u/None *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4bejd4/q_what_does_this_subreddit_think_of_aurora_by_kim/
* Score: 4

* Created: 2016-03-21T22:04:40

### Post:

I found the notion of a storytelling AI hugely compelling, and I would love to read rational fan-fiction of all that happens aboard the Ship.

### Comments:

> **u/Escapement** [+9]  *Ankh-Morpork City Watch* (16 hours later)
> 
> I haven't read Aurora, but I thought I'd post about KSR anyways.
> 
> KSR sort of annoys me as a writer. He writes up amazingly evocative spec-fic scenarios... and then fails to focus on them, instead spending his time focusing on small human elements in those stories. Now, those small human elements get completely overshadowed by their backdrop, and KSR is not particularly good or skilled at making me care about most of his characters, so it ends up being sort of like you're in a theatre trying to watch some 'spectacle' film - beautiful and sort of plotless - while sitting in front of you a small melodrama breaks out about who is sleeping with who between a guy and his girlfriend. 
> 
> This happens consistently with KSR - his Mars books focused on love triangle shit I did not give a damn about, his 40/50/60 books focused on a bunch of small interpersonal relationships and stuff, The Years of Rice and Salt focus on the romance thingy over the parallel history stuff... 
> 
> I love his worldbuilding and his science fiction backdrops, but he never makes them the center of his story, and I rarely find what he does choose to make the center of his stories at all compelling. The character he has written that I emphasize most strongly with is the Russian engineer girl from Red Mars - basically, her entire section was about how the Mars project was actually interesting and the BS love triange was uninteresting and a distraction, and that basically broke the book for me because after reading that section I couldn't really even try to take the melodrama seriously anymore. Antarctica I can't even remember what the BS plot was about, but the setting was gorgeously described.
> 
> Basically, I hate his characters 90% of the time. He often has an interesting bit of philosophy stuff in his book, and he makes or uses great backdrops and settings, but I don't even remember pretty much any of his characters' names because they were not important to me and did not feel real or interesting to me, and I did not care about their conflicts or goals most of the time. A few times the conflicts intersect the background and become interesting - the conflict between Mars Conservationism and Mars Science/Terraforming guys for example seemed pretty neat - but the majority of his stories' main plots I find tedious rather than interesting.

>> **u/Shrlck** [+3]  *Dragon Army* (18 hours later)
>> 
>> I have started Red Mars at least two times, and never progressed beyond the half of it. Your comment resonates with me.

>> **u/MatterBeam** [+1]  (a day later)
>> 
>> THIS. I could never pass from 'interested' to 'enjoying' a KSR book.

> **u/ArgentStonecutter** [+6]  *Emergency Mustelid Hologram* (15 minutes later)
> 
> Nobody in the book is even vaguely rational, even the ones who are presented as being so. The artificial society they set up isn't rational. The plot isn't rational, with people forgetting about major plot points and remembering them again as convenient for KSR. The science is wrong all over the place.
> 
> Read Wil McCarthy's Queendom series instead of you want a credible description of a failed interstellar colony. Lots of people are irrational in it, but they're consistent about it, and there are ratiional people in the background keeping things running up to the collapse.

>> **u/ArgentStonecutter** [+3]  *Emergency Mustelid Hologram* (30 minutes later)
>> 
>> If I was doing a "Rational Aurora", I'd have them avoid both planets as obvious deathtraps, and get started on building more rings of habitats. They've demonstrated they can survive long-term in the habitats without resupply, and now they have a whole system full of rock and ice to work with. They'd be working towards a society distributed through the small bodies of the system. Eventually you'd send probes in to try and figure out the source of the anomalous oxygen, but that would be low priority.

>>> **u/None** [+1]  (an hour later)
>>> 
>>> I'd be very interested to see how a few rational players would influence the broader population of the Ship, given no superpowers (other than any procured via influence on the Ship itself)

>> **u/None** [+2]  (an hour later)
>> 
>> > Nobody in the book is even vaguely rational, even the ones who are presented as being so. The artificial society they set up isn't rational. The plot isn't rational, with people forgetting about major plot points and remembering them again as convenient for KSR. The science is wrong all over the place.
>> 
>> One could say as much about the Harry Potter series or the world of Naruto as well, yet they make for entertaining rational(ist) fan-fiction fodder, which was more of my thinking. 
>> 
>> Thanks for the recommendation!

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