Welcome to the monthly meeting of the io9 Book Club. This month, we’ve read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. Jump into comments to get started talking about it!
What is this io9 Book Club all about? We meet once a month to discuss a book we’ve all read together, and then we have an online chat with the author — see our past meetings here.
For those unfamiliar with the io9 book club, here’s how it works: You read the book. We create a special book club post on io9 when the meeting is in session. That would be the post you’re reading. Then everybody talks about the book in comments for a few days, starting right now.
We hope Robinson will be joining us soon to talk about the book. So, what did you think of Aurora?
In October, we’ll be talking about The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard. We’ll be discussing it on October 6.
Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane.
DISCUSSION
Yes, let’s talk about how Robinson has absolutely no concept of how technology actually works. How he can depict a hundred-plus-year-old Digital Intelligence only slightly more sophisticated than Apple’s Siri. How he can envision a generation ship with 3D printers and quantum computers who nonetheless cannot model a simple carbon cycle in an enclosed biosphere. If the Aurora were launched twenty years from now, I could imagine its level of technology being what it is, but in the book the damn thing was launched more than a century from now. More than a century from now a colony ship will be nothing more than a giant flash drive full of the scanned connectomes and genomes of the colonists and a box of nanobes programmed to rebuild them in situ if or when they encounter a planet with a habitable biosphere—or perhaps another box loaded with terraforming microchines. All run by a Digital mind packed into an optical/quantum processor about the size of your thumbnail.