One of my favourite authors. I like how optimistic his books are, reminds me of the Culture series.
Perhaps I should muster the courage to try some of his other work.
But I'm struggling with 2140 (just checked and I'm 41% of the way through). Despite living in New York and having a lot of fun with the description of a venetian New York it's just not grabbing my interest yet. I'm going to keep plodding through it but at this stage I'd rather just start re-reading Red Mars again.
You definitely won't get that from the Mars trilogy (or indeed Antartica which is pretty much "White Mars").
I have to say I rather liked Aurora though - I thought the Ship character was well done.
Do read the Mars trilogy, which has strife, but also hope.
SPOILERS below
the characters go "well, eff it, I guess we have to make it work here on Earth". It seems to me that, in the arc of KSR's work, Aurora is the effective acceptance that humans will have to make Earth work for them, for better or worse, even as they collectively wrecked the planet. And that seems a nice segue into New York 2140.
SPOILERS below
Note however at the end of the book cryo-sleep is developed. This technology removes the main moral argument and technological difficulty against extra-solar travel as presented in the book. It is even noted in the book that a new wave of human colonization is taking place. KSR seems to be making both arguments at once but only telling one side of the story.
You do make an interesting point which I didn't emphasize: Aurora also makes a moral argument against generation ships.
But I think things get more complicated still. If you accept the book's argument, accept cryogenic sleep, but also accept that Earth is something like the biggest generation ship we have, then where do we stand? If we accept that cryogenic sleep solves that part of the moral argument, then we kind of walked into Woody Allen's plot for Sleeper (that is, why not sleep right here on Earth until things improve?) These are really tough questions to consider.
Needless to say, I think Aurora is the deepest, most introspective work that KSR has produced.
Not quite. The other difficulty presented is the sparsity of places suitable to settle at. And what you do then if you're not very lucky on arrival.
Option 1: Go to sleep and go home.
Option 2: Setup a small research station in a spun up asteroid and get terraforming.
Option 2 is much nicer with cryo-sleep. Try a terraforming experiment and sleep for 50 years to see how it worked out. You can even cycle people between Earth and the research station (see the plot of Alien). Planetary Geologists can live their lives on geologic time scales.
Or you could improve your odds by sending robots or small teams to many different stars (sleep, explore, sleep). You don't need to bring a full-cycle ecosystem until you decide to stay. Find good planetary sites and then send over the supplies.
My read of Aurora was that interstellar colonization was about to take place, but the PoV characters were against it.
It's a relief to think that even if we do fuck up Earth in ways which seem like they may be very likely to happen, it is still such a good place for humans to live, ie better than any other planet we know of, even with serious terraforming efforts.