I quite liked KSR as a kid but Aurora completely ruined him for me, it's fractally bad.
In particular the nonsense about insular dwarfism which crops up very early and makes it obvious that he does not understand the first thing about biology. He repeatedly states that the ship's genetic screening/controlled breeding system is working fine and there is no inbreeding or loss of genetic diversity, then insists that this is pointless and they are doomed because they didn't take the zoo/island effect into account. There's no attempt to find a mechanism by which that might operate despite the genetic diversity being fine, and I don't think KSR realised he needed one.
The morality is even more confused: it builds its anti-space argument around the deep immorality of generation ships, with endless discussion of the inhuman cruelty of condemning future generations to live and die in a ship for your ambition, climaxing with the protagonist attacking would-be space explorers on earth, denouncing them for a crime which none of them have or plan to commit and which she already has. Literally Freya is the only character in the entire book who we see launch a generation ship, and she uses the immorality of her own actions to condemn space exploration as a whole. KSR brushes off this hypocricy, yet he's obviously aware of it because he uses the cryosleep deux ex machina to let Freya give the speech directly instead of dictating it to the grandchildren she condemned to die in space.
Also it's a much pettier issue but I couldn't get over the fact that the ship's closed-loop ecosystem is not only divided into a bunch of different ecoregions with non-overlapping fauna but that most of them have predators including miniature bears and wolves. I half-wish the Snakes on a Plane people would option it for a sequel.
p
I quite liked KSR as a kid but Aurora completely ruined him for me, it's fractally bad.
In particular the nonsense about insular dwarfism which crops up very early and makes it obvious that he does not understand the first thing about biology. He repeatedly states that the ship's genetic screening/controlled breeding system is working fine and there is no inbreeding or loss of genetic diversity, then insists that this is pointless and they are doomed because they didn't take the zoo/island effect into account. There's no attempt to find a mechanism by which that might operate despite the genetic diversity being fine, and I don't think KSR realised he needed one.
The morality is even more confused: it builds its anti-space argument around the deep immorality of generation ships, with endless discussion of the inhuman cruelty of condemning future generations to live and die in a ship for your ambition, climaxing with the protagonist attacking would-be space explorers on earth, denouncing them for a crime which none of them have or plan to commit and which she already has. Literally Freya is the only character in the entire book who we see launch a generation ship, and she uses the immorality of her own actions to condemn space exploration as a whole. KSR brushes off this hypocricy, yet he's obviously aware of it because he uses the cryosleep deux ex machina to let Freya give the speech directly instead of dictating it to the grandchildren she condemned to die in space.
Also it's a much pettier issue but I couldn't get over the fact that the ship's closed-loop ecosystem is not only divided into a bunch of different ecoregions with non-overlapping fauna but that most of them have predators including miniature bears and wolves. I half-wish the Snakes on a Plane people would option it for a sequel.
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