Follow-up thought about KSR’s AURORA

One more thought about Kim Stanley Robinson’s AURORA: I don’t *necessarily* agree with or endorse KSR’s conclusions in this book. Which is to say, human history shows a long pattern of inventing things or implementing things that the previous generation thought was impossible, or impossibly impractical. I think AURORA is valuable for its calling to attention the realistic difficulties of interstellar colonization via generation starships, and thus it’s a worthwhile book for challenging those easy assumptions of so much SF. That’s one reason science fiction is valuable: it challenges our assumptions about what is necessarily true, including the assumptions of science fiction.