![]() Viruses, bacteria and fungi evolve much faster than “higher” life forms. Robinson doesn’t assume that keeping plants, animals and people alive on a starship for hundreds of years is simple. The colonists are faced with the choice of taking thousands of years to render a nearby sterile planet livable or voyaging to another star.Ĭomplicating the decision, the terrestrial habitats on the starship are in trouble. But they find it is infected with a deadly protovirus, so primitive that it isn’t detected before some people are infected and die. It finally arrives at a planet chosen because it had water, a breathable atmosphere and no native life. The plot concerns a starship that has taken hundreds of years to reach its destination, while generations of people on it live and die. ![]() ![]() Now Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the best contemporary writers of “hard” science fiction, has written a book that asks a contrary question: What if humanity isn’t meant to colonize the stars? Space - the final frontier? The last walk on the moon was almost 50 years ago, but there’s been little doubt in science fiction movies and novels that someday humankind will break away from our little planet and colonize the stars. ![]()
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