I feel like the tide is turning in popular culture a bit. One of the best books I've read this year was Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora which I blogged about last month. It was an especially moving story about a "generation ship" (another classic space-exploration meme) and all the things that could go wrong with such a wildly complex operation.

It managed to be a tale of survival while simultaneously being a tale of defeat. And this from an author whose Mars Trilogy did a lot to popularize the ideas of terraforming.

As a lover of SF, I have mixed feelings about this. But it does show that rational voices are starting to enter the conversation about space exploration.