The Sword and Laser discussion

I found the book ok, I don't agree with the main premise (view spoiler)[, we have to stay on earth, there's no planet B, (hide spoiler)] so that might have skewed my perspective, but there were a few plot points that I hated and I just had to accept and continue with the story without thinking too much about them:
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1. If you go with all the trouble of creating the biomes, why not create rules regarding interbreeding inside the biomes, it look like pretty much they were just going out for the walkaround and then coming back and breeding with people in their original biome.
2. The colonization attempt was abandoned too quickly. No attempts to communicate with Earth to send resupplies, additional help after the first colonization attempt failed.
3. The ship could have had control over the ship even over the printers on the planet, but it has no way to eliminate people trying to build guns on the colony on the second planet or outside its range.
4. The laser that was used to help the ship break was never used again once the ship was inside the Solar System.
5. I interpreted that the whole narration was from the viewpoint of Ship, even the first part before she learned to "narrate" , but the fact that the narration stays on the same voice even after Ship was destroyed was really grating.
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So that's it, I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

2)(view spoiler)[
Realize the distances involved. Even with light speed communications Tau Ceti is a 24 year round trip for a message (it's 12 lightyears away). A 'resupply' is thus decades, if not centuries in transit unless Earth has developed a way to send physical resupply at or close to light speed (and remember, it has to slow down, too).

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Additionally, I think KSR is pushing back against a faction of thinking that goes 'well, we're screwing up Earth, time to look at colonizing elsewhere." The entire novel is an argument that elsewhere is highly unlikely to be friendly to our form of life and that it's incredibly hard to create and maintain the complex biosphere humans would need to survive a long space voyage.

Yeah, the end of the book seemed to get very political. (view spoiler)[ I don't know anything about KSR, but it sounds like he may be a big surfer. I noticed that his use of "beaches" only applied to ocean beaches - growing up a bit inland I almost always went to the beach at a lake or pond, not the ocean. (hide spoiler)]

Dave wrote: "Yeah, the end of the book seemed to get very political. [spoilers removed]"

Well, he lives in Davis,CA. Thats not very close to the ocean, but it is California. So maybe he has a Cali viewpoint?

Almost all his books have an environmentalist bent, or at least focus heavily on ecological science. As heavy-handed as this one was, his Sciencce in the Capitol books are even more so.

I think it would be better to tag a big "SPOILERS" sign on the title instead of covering most of the posts we make here. I'd like to comment some of Andres criticisms:

Update: By terpkristin request I'm adding the "spoiler" tag to my arguments below.

(view spoiler)[

1. If you go with all the trouble of creating the biomes, why not create rules regarding interbreeding inside the biomes, it look like pretty much they were just going out for the walkaround and then coming back and breeding with people in their original biome.

I don't think the main problem was with people interbreeding. The big issues started at a microscopic level, with bacteria evolving much too quickly for the small amount of mammals (not just humans) to adapt.

2. The colonization attempt was abandoned too quickly. No attempts to communicate with Earth to send resupplies, additional help after the first colonization attempt failed.

As Rick pointed out, they would have to wait for 28 years just to get a response from Earth. Ressuplies would take at least 150 years to arrive. They were pretty much on their own.
And there was also the nature of the problem they found. There was something alive (or near living) over the whole surface of Aurora that was deadly to them. Staying there would mean not going out without a suit for a really long time, which pretty much made useless the fact that the air was potentially breathable.

3. The ship could have had control over the ship even over the printers on the planet, but it has no way to eliminate people trying to build guns on the colony on the second planet or outside its range.

I don't remember this happening at any moment in the story. People simply stopped trying to print guns after a while. Which wouldn't stop people to try to build weapons in other ways if necessary. Anyway, I believe that ships "powers" were pretty much defined, and the author kept within these limits. Ship's will to intervene is another matter.

4. The laser that was used to help the ship break was never used again once the ship was inside the Solar System.

Ships powered by lasers can only be accelerated or decelerated in a straight line, and it takes a long time to cause a significant impact on its velocity. In other words, the speed change is of very little significance within the distance of the solar system.

Stephen Hawking is planning to launch a tiny ship based on this concept in the near future (link to the story below)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...


5. I interpreted that the whole narration was from the viewpoint of Ship, even the first part before she learned to "narrate" , but the fact that the narration stays on the same voice even after Ship was destroyed was really grating.

I had a different interpretation on that. There is an impersonal narrator at the start of the story, and the narration shifts to the ship once Devi asks it to create an account of their story. Once (view spoiler)[ ship is destroyed (hide spoiler)] the original narration takes hold again. But indeed, the transition is not clear, and left me confused at some moments.

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I think it would be better to tag a big "SPOILERS" sign on the title
it is in the title, I added the spoiler just in case anyone click without paying much attention.

the end of the book seemed to get very political
certainly

(view spoiler)[
The big issues started at a microscopic level, with bacteria evolving much too quickly (...)
I agree, I still think there should be more cross between biomes.

I don't remember this happening at any moment in the story. People simply stopped trying to print guns after a while
I was pretty sure Ship was using gas chamber techniques to stop this? maybe I got it mixed with the techniques used to stop the sistership story. (hide spoiler)]

Ships powered by lasers can only be accelerated (...)
I see, this note would have been helpful in the book, KSR usually doesn't stop at explaining anything and it seemed like an oversight.

Other than that I agree that he gets heavily political at the end,(view spoiler)[ I love the sea though and absolutely enjoyed his descriptions of the bodyboarding experience. (hide spoiler)]
Edit: for spoilers

It's common courtesy in these forums to use spoiler tags even if the topic includes "spoiler." There was a thread on this and it was brought up in the podcast. It would be nice to please continue spoiler tag use. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Noted, terpkristin, I'm adding the "spoiler" tag to my remarks.

Although I do sustain that on some discussions the excessive use of the spoiler tag is detrimental to the debate.

I already mentioned this in the "voting" thread, but I'll say it here, too:

(view spoiler)[I was also bothered by how easily they gave up any attempts at colonization. Yes, Aurora didn't quite work out, and colonizing the other planet will be difficult, but instead of dealing with that, about half of them (including our primary protagonist) just go, "that sounds hard, screw that, let's go home," because I guess they all just forgot all the crap that was going wrong with the ship before. And then, surprise surprise, shit continues to go wrong on the trip back. Who could have seen that coming? Why am I not supposed to hope these idiots don't accidentally get blown up or fly into the sun again? (hide spoiler)]

To defend some of these issues:

2. Rick already addressed this one.
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3. The ship didn't control the printers to prevent guns from being manufactured. After the 68 accords, the "templates" for any projectile weapons were sabotaged to prevent the creation of any such weapons. So, even after the ship left Iris, the stayers couldn't print working weapons in any case. In any case, I think that any printers that were taken "off-ship" were not the concern of the ship.
4. I have to assume that in order for the laser to function as a constant source of acceleration/deceleration, the ship would have had to be travelling skew to the planetary orbital plane. Otherwise, the laser would have to be intermittently turned off or blocked by the other celestial objects in the solar system. Because of this, once the ship had re-entered the solar system, any use of the laser would have effectively pushed the ship off the orbital plane again, which would be counterproductive to its gravitation reverse sling strategem.

Also, and maybe I'm misremembering this, but I thought that the ship had to "catch" the laser with its ablation plate. If so, once the ship had entered the solar system, this ablation plate would have to be constantly moving around the ship to continuously face Saturn. (Although, come to think of it...if it needed the ablation plate to catch the laser...then what was protecting the ship from front collisions? Maybe there were 2 ablation plates?)

5. I actually agree with your 5th point. In fact, I started to get the sense that the Ship and not Freya was the protagonist. Which meant that the last section of the book felt completely pointless to me. And I could have sworn that at some points, the ship's narrative speaks about future events, as if it had survived to record them.
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In addition to the comments made by others on point #2.

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Freya was already primed with the idea that colonization was a mistake. Devi already had her convinced that while the people who had designed the ship did the best job they knew how, it wasn't enough to allow the colonization to succeed. Couple that with the loss of her best friend, and it's not surprising she's ready to give up on the dream of colonization.

Freya is popular on the ship and is a leader among the people, her opinion will influence many, so I felt it was reasonable that there would be a large faction of people who wanted to go back once Freya presented idea.
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Man I was bugged by a lot of the science in this one. I really enjoyed his Mars trilogy even if it did drag at the end. KSR strength is often the politics and interactions of his characters and not the science.

My major science problems are (view spoiler)[

1) Assuming that an oxygen rich planet would have no native life.

This is completely bonkers. Oxygen is highly reactive and has to be constantly produced for a stable Oxygen atmosphere to exist. In fact Lovelock figured this out in the 70's as a method for looking for life elsewhere in the Universe (i.e. look for an unstable environment of any type).

2) No survey of the moon before landing. No biological analysis of the planet. No exposing some of the animals to the planet to see what happened.

KSR appears to have assumed that the colonists are incompetent. I have plots that rely on people screwing up in obvious ways.

3) If the ship has a magnetic shield, why doesn't it collect interstellar gas as an alternative fuel source.

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I prefer Greg Egan's ideas on interstellar exploration. For example Diaspora which has instances of people who have been uploaded into quantum computers sent in small substrates. I.e. small space ships that take minimal energy. (I also like a book with a solar system sized collider :-) )

Iain

Iain wrote: "Man I was bugged by a lot of the science in this one. I really enjoyed his Mars trilogy even if it did drag at the end. KSR strength is often the politics and interactions of his characters and not..."

Well said sir. I very much agree with your comments (both inside spoiler and without). We are resourceful; we can solve big problems.

Things that bothered me, not all hurt the book for me:
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1. Internal ship security was all key pads. *We* don't use that kind of tech anymore, why are they still doing that in 2400?
2. Everybody had access to key ship areas, as if the designers never worried that there might be terrorism or a crazy person in 2000 people over 7 generations.
3. Everybody wants to have more than 2 kids for some reason when we know from actual human behaviour on Earth, happy humans with good birth survivability tend to have a negative population growth.
4. Tech in general seemed to be not that much farther ahead than current technology, other than printers and ferries which seemed almost magical in their abilities. Food production, in particular, was almost pre-industrial revolution for some reason.
5. Ship seemed to be the only super AI in existence. Ever.
6. The narration continued on after Ship's death. Wat?
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Maybe it's because I skew toward a more posthuman, post-singularity-of-some-kind future, but much so-called hard science fiction, and this book in particular, seems not to hold out much hope at all for breakthroughs in science -- especially in the area of biotech.

Okay, not everybody wants to put credence in Alcubierre's warp bubble or any similar workaround to the celestial speed limit. Fictionally, that can even be an interesting limitation. But, in my version of this generation ship saga, assuming they even use bodies for the trip, and elect to remain conscious throughout their voyage, the same people who left Earth, give or take a few accidental deaths and repopulation events, arrive at the chosen star system. Far from rehashing ancient arguments about the privacy issues that surround being "chipped," these individuals are entirely networked to one another and the ship, and various crew members are modded and enhanced in a variety of ways.

They find an inimical "bug" on the first hospitable orb they investigate, and quickly develop a vaccine, or modify their own molecular structure to resist it. Some remain, while others push off to investigate other possible new homes. Done and done. Maybe less agita and infighting in my version, but it actually seems more plausible to me, that many centuries forward, than KSR's otherwise entertaining novel.

The issue with your version, though, is that you've given them a Win button and eliminated conflict. Conflict drives the story - if it's always "well, they're a near god like hive mind" then there's nothing they can't do and all challenges become trivial. That's more a travelogue and less a novel.

It's also almost PRECISELY that aesthetic that the novel is pushing back against. The idea that we'll just naturally become these magical post-humans so why worry about mundane things like droughts and superstorms caused by climate change or epidemics brought about by new bugs like Zika? We'll just naturally ascend and get beyond all of that. In many ways the singularity/post-human outlook is the modern geek version of the rapture. Why worry about this life, the next one will be all better.

Thanks, Rick – you make very good points. Still, I don't see a mutual exclusivity between vastly improving the stewardship humans have been doing with this planet and hoping for the kind of exponential advances in all fields of science that seem (to me) almost inevitable. In fact, it seems to be me that science is our best hope for retiring fossil fuels and addressing hunger and the burgeoning problem of worldwide drought. So, I don't see it as a "trash one planet and move on to the next" mentality, though I'm sure some do, and would in any hypothetical future.

Yes,

The dichotomy is not v Ryan useful. Moon shots inspire us to dream, as does Antarctic exploration, great science, art and many more then things. We should aspire to be better, then learn and grow.

We can save the world and dream of a better future at the same time. After all that is s why we read SF.

Of course we can, but KSR is in conversation here with the hundreds of SF novels that imply that we can use the Earth up and leave it behind. I'm absolutely positive he's aware of all the technologies and plot holes that make his book problematic, but his point remains: there is no Planet B.

As Lindsay notes, this book isn't addressing the people who want to use science to fix earth, but those who talk about uploading etc and simply leaving it behind. The underlying assumption in many of those scenarios is almost biblical - in the Bible, the just and righteous get to heaven. In singularity scenarios, it's also the 'right' people.

I think KSR is opposing this on two grounds - one is that it may well be far far harder than we think to find some place where we can live since we evolved here and not there. Second is the blind belief that of course science will always produce an answer in the nick of time. It can produce answers but only if you use it to solve the right problems.


Finally, I think I linked it here but Charlie Stross did a great and lengthy post on just how HARD interstellar travel is, how vast the distances are, etc. Yes, it's fun to read SF where we've solved this via some FTL McGuffin - but too often people forget that it IS a McGuffin and they start to form attitudes about things like star travel that aren't based in current physical reality.

I had two questions and a comment. I'll hide them all in the interests of those that haven't finished.

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1) I don't get how they expected to be able to deal with either Aurora or Iris given their size. Life on Aurora inimicable to human colonization would be assumed, and Iris needed millennia to be freely habitable. Even with two ships, they'd need to be able to live on-board while the terraforming took place.

Maybe his point is that they were that foolish.

2) Once the ship knows the laser is going to late, why doesn't it immediately decelerate? Slowing down immediately would have given them more time to use the laser to halt them without issue. Also, once they were slowed down, why was there no effort to get them fuel by matching speeds? In 12 years? I can see plot reasons to have them fail, but the lack of consideration was jarring.

Related is why not take enough fuel to stop? Given the time they stayed at Iris, I would have expected that at the least they would have delayed their full acceleration until they heard for sure. But why not load fuel for acceleration and deceleration? They were much lighter with only one ring, and I didn't get the impression that fuel was that time consuming to gather.

3) More a comment - I don't think the author is against colonization, just against doing it half way. Doing it right would have meant something like terraforming Iris remotely with AI or with a much larger arcology. Getting liquid water on planet and seeding it with Earth life, so it could be habitable. Even then, it would have been a risky endeavor.

Want to terraform Mars? Throw iron rich asteroids at Mars until you remelt the core, giving it a magnetic field again and adding mass needed to hold onto its atmosphere. Then let it cool and throw ice at it until you get enough water to sustain life. That kind of mass moving and planning time is currently not within our grasp, but it may be what's necessary for humans to live long term off of this planet. I think that's what he's trying to point out. I could also be completely wrong. Feel free to tell me why (nicely of course).

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Regarding #3, I think you're right. KSR isn't against colonization per se, but against using it as a magic get out of a dying Earth free card, i.e. the assumption that of course we'll be able to easily live elsewhere and that getting there will be relatively trivial. Too often the people writing fiction where we colonize either posit some kind of FTL or a generation ship that just works. I see Aurora as a reaction against those assumptions, pointing out that the former is impossible (barring some rewriting of physics) and the latter is far more complex than we generally assume.

Some of your proposed measures are reasonable in the sense that they don't violate physics as we know it, but they require a fair bit of highly advanced tech *and* a society rich enough to do those things without committing significant chunks of the GDP to accomplish them.

Rick wrote: "Some of your proposed measures are reasonable in the sense that they don't violate physics as we know it, but they require a fair bit of highly advanced tech *and* a society rich enough to do those things without committing significant chunks of the GDP to accomplish them. "

Right, I made those suggestions just to point out the amount of time, effort, and technology that is required. I get the impression that the author may have been buttonholed at a few too many conventions by bright-eyed enthusiasts and this was his way of "well actually" -ing them.

The thing I didn't get was (view spoiler)[ didn't they resupply the ship with elements from the planet before they discovered the prion? I thought it would come up that due to the small infusion of planet elements, everyone on the ship had been inoculated and could safely land. (hide spoiler)]

Tomislav wrote: "[spoilers removed]"

(view spoiler)[Because sand and a beach takes a while to form. Rapid sea level rise would mean minimal beaches for at least decades and probably centuries. (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[Ok, but it would affect the majority of the world's beaches because they are at sea level. It's been a while since I read this one, but I think the beach that she was at was somewhere in Africa? (hide spoiler)]