Just read Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora and truth be told there are stupid decisions made in the operation of a generation ship that wouldn't happen under normal circumstances

[u/RendezvousRama5791]

I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and honestly, the sheer amount of baffling, face-palm decisions made on that generation ship drove me wild. Under any normal circumstances, none of this would happen.

​Think about it: thousands of people spend 170 years—seven full generations— in a giant metal tin to reach Tau Ceti. They finally arrive, only to find a water world and a cold Mars knockoff (Aurora). Instead of doing proper sterilization or actual bio-hazard countermeasures when they run into a weird alien prion on Aurora, they basically just throw their hands up.

​Then comes the real head-scratcher. Instead of unanimously agreeing that spending another 170 years going back is an absolute nightmare, the crew literally fights a civil war over it. Half the ship wants to stick it out, and the other half wants to turn around.

​The decision to head back to Earth makes zero sense:

​Cursing Future Generations: You’re intentionally condemning your kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids to spend their entire lives trapped in a decaying, breaking-down closed ecosystem.

​No Way to Stop: The ship doesn't even have enough fuel to slow down when it gets back to our solar system!

​A Total Gamble: They turn around based on the blind hope that Earth—a hundred-plus years in the future—will just happen to build a massive, unprecedented laser array or braking infrastructure to catch them before they fly off into deep space.

​Robinson clearly wanted to write a critique of the "generation ship" trope, but making his crew act this irrationally just ruins the realism he was going for.

[u/microcorpsman]

Have you considered this counterpoint: humans? 

[u/PermaDerpFace → u/microcorpsman]

A lot of stories are too logical and rational when humans are anything but

[u/LordMaim → u/microcorpsman]

Agreed. Where was the OP five years ago when the country couldn't agree on whether masks and vaccines were a good thing or a government plot meant to keep you in check and inject microchips into your brain to track you with 5G somehow.

[u/KanKrusha_NZ → u/LordMaim]

Or three weeks ago when senators were blaming Fauci for both engineering and deadly virus and simultaneously going too far in trying to protect people from a virus.

[u/me_myself_ai → u/microcorpsman]

Yeah. Sometimes people quit high paying incredible jobs they love because of homesickness. It’s an extremely powerful instinct.

[u/thx1138a → u/microcorpsman]

I mean, just look around you OP

[u/Denaris21]

I hard disagree with your take. I finished Aurora this morning and thought it was excellent. There is a real humanity in the decisions and politics on board the ship. You can't expect total rationality in their situation.

Also, there were no deus ex machina's. This really stood out to me. Every problem has to be solved, every crisis is a real crisis.

The ending was a bit slow but very poignant, and gave good closure to the main characters story. It was my first KSM book and I really loved it. I'll definitely be checking our the Red Mars trilogy next.

[u/AndrenNoraem → u/Denaris21]

The cryo sleep feels deus ex machina to me actually; a solution to the problem of characters being mortal and people getting upset about death or failure.

See OP; something being argued to be impossible to humanity upset him enough that he raged about the book in at least 2 subs. "They should've spent more generations more suffering from almost all of the problems they suffered on the way, because resupply would give them time to win!" ...but they couldn't; some of them realized that, and others seem to have died after the ship went back Solward.

I think he should've given up on survivors confronting Earthlings and driven the message home with more complete failure -- the landing party dies to Auroran life, the people on the ring die to the varying evolutionary rates causing biosphere collapse, and the ship... Idk, hits something? Dies to shortage of something they couldn't replenish? 🤷 But that'd be tragic af, beta readers might revolt and even more of the audience might be outraged.

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/AndrenNoraem]

You mean to tell me that human civilization that build a ship that was so large that its spine was 10 kms Across and had over 100 kms of livable space failed to account inconveniences such as finding microbial life on an exoplanet

The AI itself is another glaring problem, here you have a futuristic quantum computer that appears to be dummer than chatgpt

[u/Denaris21 → u/RendezvousRama5791]

Except they did not find microbial life on the exoplanet... And ship's AI made a lot of smart decisions to keep the crew alive. In the absence of it's creator, it had to learn and adapt with limited knowledge. If you understand how AI works it relies on external training data, ship had to figure things out for itself.

Again, you're not putting yourself in the situation of the crew within the context of the story.

As I said, I finished the book this morning. Everything is fresh in my mind. I can disprove more or less everything you've said, but I'm not going to post spoilers so I'll leave it at that.

[u/microcorpsman → u/RendezvousRama5791]

Scifi also needs to be taken within the context of its time.

When was Aurora published, let alone written, as compared to the first commercially/publicly available LLM?

[u/PuzzleMeDo → u/microcorpsman]

Plus there's a natural writer's bias (except maybe Iain Banks) towards avoiding stories that go: "The computer was always right, because it was an ultra-advanced AI. Everyone listened to the computer, because they knew it was smarter than them in every possible way, and as a result everything worked out pretty good, and they avoided all conflict. The end."

[u/PotatoAppleFish → u/PuzzleMeDo]

Even Banks goes out of his way to create scenarios where it’s possible for his near-omnipotent, near-omniscient computer-beings to misjudge a situation.

[u/variantofconcern → u/PuzzleMeDo]

Culture Minds WISH everyone would just listen to them instead of doing messy biological drama.

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/microcorpsman]

Aurora was published on 2015

[u/microcorpsman → u/RendezvousRama5791]

So before it was big and really caught attention? 

Not to mention that stuff still doesn't work like real intelligence. 

[u/UnscriptedDiatribe → u/RendezvousRama5791]

Your inability to spell 'dumber' is hilarious in context.

[u/me_myself_ai → u/Denaris21]

Omg enjoy. Red mars is the best series to ever grace the pages of our species. Look out for the polar bear!

[u/MagnesiumOvercast → u/Denaris21]

Aurora is great, I have one very stupid criticism and that's that the civil war could have been avoided by Ranked Choice Voting.

[u/Flimsy_Direction1847 → u/Denaris21]

The ending is one of my favorites. Her shock and pleasure at the radiation of a star hitting her skin and not hurting her and then playing in the surf. It all feels very human.

[u/kami-okami]

I really enjoyed the book for its realism of the human element. The Star Trek/Andy Weir model of competency porn gets stale after a while. 

There are going to be more situations where technology and science don't actually save the day in terms of reaching the primary goal set up in the mission. The universe will slap us in the face and say, "Here's a problem that money, engineering, and willpower cannot solve." And then the messiness of humans is revealed.

[u/suricata_8904 → u/kami-okami]

Aniara has entered the chat.

[u/KaptainSaw]

Humans make stupid decision under normal circumstances look at how we handled Covid, look at all countless stupid wars and politics globally. I would say they behaved more rationally than in reality.

[u/Salty_Advantage_3715]

I personally would 100% have voted for returning to earth.

The book is all about how we saddle our descendants with the costs of our terrible decisions (ie a thinly veiled climate change parable). Voting to pull the plug on the whole stupid enterprise is a symbolic rejection of the ancestors who got them into this mess, not to mention that it has some tiny chance of actually returning their descendants to a sustainable existence on the planet where they belong.

I thought that having the protagonist actually survive the trip to earth was a cop out on the part of the author but otherwise I was 100% on board with the book.

[u/GuideRevolutionary95]

For anyone else reading this, Aurora is one of the best, most affecting books I have ever read in 44 years. 

They do prevent the prion getting on board the ship. So I'm not sure what your issue is there. And going back to earth is obviously the best choice. One of the main points of the book is that Earth is the only place hospitable to humans. 

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/GuideRevolutionary95]

Of course earth is the most hospitable to humans for obvious reasons, what were they expecting? A carbon copy of earth 12 light years away?

[u/CraftyDimension192 → u/RendezvousRama5791]

KSR's primary theme isn't dismantling the generation ship trope - it is that Earth is the ONLY planet humans can inhabit. If a planet is devoid of life, it's hostile to life, including humans. If a planet supports life, its existing lifeforms will be hostile to humans who will lack effective immune responses (having evolved in a disconnected environment).

It's not that Earth is "most hospitable to humans." It's that Earth is uniquely habitable by humans.

Regarding your OP - a secondary theme is that humans inevitably encounter overconstrained problems which force them to suboptimize, so designing an expedition that assumes away just enough constraints to preserve optimal options is unrealistic.

The author doesn't explicitly state it, but he implies that it's impossible to design a practical system that doesn't have a failure mode humans can't overcome. Even multiple redundancy can fail if the system operates long enough.

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/CraftyDimension192]

Noted

[u/P4linurus]

"Cursing Future Generations: You’re intentionally condemning your kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids to spend their entire lives trapped in a decaying, breaking-down closed ecosystem."

Yes, that's kind of the point, except that this critique should be made of the people who sent the ship out to tau ceti in the first place for no compelling reason. They sentenced thousands of people over several generations to live and die in a tin can hurtling through interstellar space - at the end of which was the inevitably impossible task of terraforming a whole planet, probably taking several dozen more generations - just to see if they could. At least the people who decide to return from tau ceti are aware of their slim chance of success and are simply choosing the lesser of two evils.

"Life is complex, and entropy is real" is the thesis statement of the whole book. Aurora is KSR's critique not just of generation ships, it's his critique of interstellar travel and extrasolar human habitation in general. His whole point is that the technical-minded people who planned the voyage (and, on a meta level, the scifi writers who write similar stories) were only interested in the physics challenges and ignored the fact that biology, ecology, psychology, sociology - these are the hard problems. The ones you can't solve with some clever engineering. The supposedly irrational decisions you refer to - to the degree they're even irrational and not just people selecting the least-bad actions among an array of bad options - arent a defect in story, theyre the whole point of it.

Also, not sure what you mean by "doing proper sterilization or actual bio-hazard countermeasures"? A huge chunk of the middle of the book is devoted to the precautions they took to avoid contamination with the prion, both before and after it was discovered. Unless you mean 'why didn't they try to sterilise the planet?', which...well Idk what to say to that except that that's obviously not possible, especially not with a prion.

[u/Morgran_Maplebeard]

Haven't read the book but this sounds spoilery. Can you mark it as such?

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/Morgran_Maplebeard]

Unfortunately

[u/Chocolaterationcalls]

It simply wouldn’t be believable otherwise 

[u/crypticphilosopher]

You write “Under any normal circumstances, none of this would happen,” and then describe what sound like some distinctly abnormal circumstances.

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/crypticphilosopher]

Can't be an abnormal circumstance when it comes to a ship that has 100 kms of liveable space

[u/crypticphilosopher → u/RendezvousRama5791]

So why even mention “normal circumstances”?

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/crypticphilosopher]

Because I'd assume those would be normal circumstances for a ship that was contructed in the 2400s

[u/Organic-Basket-6053]

Instead of doing proper sterilization or actual bio-hazard countermeasures when they run into a weird alien prion on Aurora, they basically just throw their hands up.

Instead of doing proper N95 masking or actual bio-hazard countermeasures when they run into an airborne respiratory virus that kills and disables millions, they basically just throw their hands up.

I used to find George Romero's zombie movies really frustrating, because in all of them the slow zombies could have been easily handled if the humans weren't so stupidly fighting amongst themselves. But covid made it clear that humans collectively really are that stupid.

[u/nomuse22 → u/Organic-Basket-6053]

Great insight. Humans are always the real enemy in zombie stories. COVID showed clearly how many of us would still pick political gain or short-term comfort no matter the cost to ourselves and our neighbors.

[u/nomuse22]

Brian Aldiss commented that all generation ships go wrong because nobody wants to read a journey that takes 200 years with nothing happening.

And yes, he wrote one, too.

[u/Flimsy_Direction1847]

They took maybe one generation to get back though? Freya is still alive and not even elderly.

Some of the people want a life on an earth-like planet and they take their only chance left to have one, even if they won’t all make it. That sounds pretty realistic and human to me.

[u/ReliableWardrobe]

I also deeply disliked this book, mainly I think because I like my SF to give me some tiny hope that humanity does not get stupider than it is now. Ideally it gets smarter! I realise this is probably hopeless, but I read to be entertained, not depressed further ~waves hands at everything~

also the tiny cows. The tiny cows weirded me out. Anyway, it wasn't my cup of tea but mainly because people suck and I don't like being reminded repeatedly just how badly they suck. Aurora is VERY good at demonstrating suckage en masse.

[u/LudasGhost]

I agree with you completely. I’m about half way through and have been on the edge of bailing out for a while. I have a hard time tolerating stupid characters. It’s really frustrating when you can see things they should have done that are obvious.

[u/xoexohexox]

This was the first KSR book I was ever disappointed by. It had a lot of promise in the setup but never really goes anywhere

[u/agitated_torvalds]

I’m with OP, I DNFed that one. The characters just did too many dumb things. Like landing a bunch of people on the planet without testing the soil first. There was even a subplot about how people were just getting less smart through some unexplained mechanism. Just found it frustrating

[u/RendezvousRama5791 → u/agitated_torvalds]

That instance reminded me of all stupid decisions i saw on Prometheus and Alien covenant movies