/lit/ - Literature

About a year late, but I just finished reading Aurora.

This book really fucked me up. This is the kind of book that made me angry at the author for abusing his characters. Then the author told me to shut the fuck up and tried his best to reach out of the book and punch me in the face. This book was as depressing as Blindsight by Peter Watts and as bizarre as God Emperor of Dune. On the first page I rolled my eyes thinking "here's a nice parochial scene that will surely have some overdone metaphoric significance later on." By the middle of the book I thought "well, I have to hand it to him," and by the end I realized KSR is a fucking genius for having manipulated me so effectively.

I think this book was written for people who get emotional thinking about the Voyager probes. But a lot of other people must've hated it. For one thing, this book is so ambitious that "the problem of consciousness" is merely a subplot.

The character development is incredible, especially for a book masquerading as "hard sci-fi," and the literary quality of the writing shows how much KSR has improved over the past 20 years or so. Almost Proustian at times, in a 27th century kind of way.