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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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I've never gotten around to reading the Mars trilogy. Maybe I should, but the one novel I did finish, Aurora, made me want to puke. Now I feel like writing a full review which will be, no points for guessing, highly negative. The following is a Cliff notes version, not spoilered because I literally don't respect it enough to care:

  • Humanity sends a generational colony ship to Alpha Centauri. It is arguably the worst designed ship and mission ever conceived.
  • The protagonist is a moron, in the metaphorical, literal and technical sense. The novel outright says so, apparently all the humans on board, after several generations of insular degradation, have become dumb as rocks. The exact mechanism remains unclear to me, something something insular dwarfism? They did not have the sense to pack medical or genetic tooling to prevent this.
  • The life support and ecology degrade. This is somewhat understandable, closed loops are hard on a smaller than planetary scale. What doesn't make sense is how they are so ridiculously underequipped to tackle it.
  • The AI, running on a quantum computer, somehow becomes self aware. Don't ask. It is also about as smart as the protagonist.
  • They get to their destination, land a ship with colonists and minimal environmental protection, and almost everyone sent down dies of a prion illness.
  • They just... give up. No robotic follow through, no real attempt to find solutions.
  • There's a political schism, the protagonist and half the crew want to go home. The other half stays. As a compromise, both decide to kill themselves, by splitting the available resources.
  • You're telling me that a civilization that launched a ship that could cross interstellar distances and survive 170 years is that bad at ISRU? They 100% should be capable of using their existing infrastructure to make durable habitats or asteroid mining. Fuck me with a rusty pole I guess.
  • They launch the ship.
  • Things go south, the people left behind likely die. The ones on board would die, if Deus Ex Machina in the form of the civilization back on earth finally inventing cryopsleep didn't save their asses.
  • They get to Earth, there's no real mechanism to terminate their residual velocity. The novel dodges the issue of AI sapience by having it ride the ship into the Sun.
  • Turns out interstellar colonization really is impossible, because the ineffable Earthiness of Earth is that important. Even interplanetary spacers must make pilgrimages back to kiss the dirt or floss their teeth with it, or die I guess.
  • The end. Don't try interstellar colonization kids, Mother Earth is all you need, and all you'll get.

The characters are retarded. The tech is woeful. The novel has no redeeming qualities I can think of. It's a morality tale dressed up in a hard-sf frock.

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.

Mars trilogy is much better than that. Not as moralistic for sure: there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.

It does seem his work has degraded a bit over time because I also hated Ministry for the Future (dude if global warming was that easy to solve we would have done it).

there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.

To me it seemed that he design the gift economy some of the Martians end up with to be pretty utopian. But yes, he does't dwell on it, or even elaborate very much.

KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.

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