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KSR has always specialized in "realistic" feeling sci fi with characters that terraform and survive in tough settings through science, technological know-how, and political organizing. But his recent climate-change novels have gotten pretty bleak at some points- I couldn't finish Ministry for the Future.

Luckily Aurora isnt tough going like that - its lively, enjoyable reading. It's the kind of multi-generational space voyage and settlement narrative - laced with lots of technology and science talk -- that many sci fi writers have covered before, but he stops to ask a question I can't recall encountering before: what if this is a terrible idea? What if humans really can't conquer the stars?

Magic, colonialism, slavery, gunboat diplomacy, opium wars, linguistics and language, the industrial revolution, Luddites...all wrapped up in the story of four intensely sympathetic and young scholars sent up to Oxford to study in the tower at the center of the Empire.