Aurora

This story is set in the second half of the Third Millennium CE, and it concerns the arrival of a pioneering interstellar expedition to the exoplanet Aurora in the Tau Ceti system via a generation starship, followed by the return of the ship to Earth with a portion of its descended population. It is in seven long chapters, of which the bracketing first and last are in a limited third person voice with a viewpoint character named Freya, the daughter of the ship's de facto captain (really chief engineer, without even that title) on its final approach to Aurora.

The middle five chapters are in the voice of the ship's artificial intelligence, a bundle of systems including a core quantum computer, briefly personified as "Pauline," but show more ultimately referring to itself as "we, the ship." This novel was written before the 2020s chatbot revolution powered by large language models, and author Kim Stanley Robinson considerably overestimated the scrupulousness of machines in fabricating narratives, as well as the novelty of asking one to tell a story. But the resulting speaker is interesting and humane, allowing Robinson to mix in his usual variety of scientific exposition and philosophical reflection in a new and elegant way.

The agency of this computer system and its involvement in the political difficulties among the ship's inhabitants reminded me distinctly of Mike in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. There were also clever shout-outs to Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (79) and Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun (301) to position Aurora in a long science-fictional conversation.

I have read other reviewers who found the characterizations in this book lacking or unsympathetic, but my experience was to the contrary. As in Robinson's seminal Mars books or his Years of Rice and Salt, my reading discovered characters with real human inconsistencies, confused loyalties, and emotional depth.

Despite Robinson's care with scientific detail, he was in fact relatively sanguine about the terrestrial qualities of the Tau Ceti exoplanets, and he chose to disregard the dangers posed by the system's conspicuous debris disk in terms of meteoric impacts. But his conclusion about the habitability of exoplanets in general is extremely dire. He proposes an "answer to Fermi's Paradox" (191) that rests on the premise that biota from different stars are inherently toxic to one another, and he suggests that any species clever enough to travel between systems soon become too wise to do so.

This book is genuinely "hard" sf, both in the accustomed sense of attention to technical and scientific matters, and in the sense of difficulty of its message, which runs against the inertia of received sf metanarratives. It is pessimistic in many respects, and the middle of the book often gave me a feeling of dread about what must follow the difficulties described. But I was glad that I persevered, and I really enjoyed the final two chapters, which were both terrifically unconventional and in their own ways inspiring. show less

A spaceship containing around two thousand humans is engaged in multi-generational interstellar travel, a journey of 160 years, from Saturn to the Tau Ceti system. As the story opens, it is approaching its destination. The engineer, Devi, is trying to keep the ship running properly. She is fixing problems occurring due to the length of the trip, deficiencies in design, entropy, and mechanical stresses. Consumables are running low, and destabilizing forces (such as devolution and mutations) inhibit the ship’s ability to maintain a healthy balance of all compounds, nutrients, and lifeforms in the biomes. The deceleration and increased gravitational pull add to the stresses on both people and spaceship. Eventually, a landing party show more reaches Aurora, a moon in the Tau Ceti system. After this point, any further plot points would be spoilers.

The protagonists are Freya, Devi's daughter, and Ship, the spaceship’s Artificial Intelligence. Devi asks Ship to create a narrative about the trip. The spaceship’s computer is an emerging AI that needs specific instructions (has not yet learned everything it needs to create the narrative, almost like a human child). Ship gets only barebones guidance from Devi, since she has her hands full keeping the spaceship running.

Ship requests permission to focus the narrative on Freya, and Devi agrees, so the initial phases of the story are straight-forward, following Freya’s actions. Freya goes on an authorized “wander” to visit each of the twelve biomes. This construct has the benefit of giving the reader the needed details on the contents, environment, and structure of the spaceship. Ship occasionally inserts observations on its creation of the narrative. Over time, Ship assumes a unique personality of its own, and the narrative gets more complex. I particularly enjoyed the development of Ship.

Robinson examines themes such as the transferability of evolutionary advantages and the ability to terraform rapidly enough to support a colony. It is not a book about characters – they exist in service to the themes. It is more about the larger concept of social adaptation. It also covers psychological stresses, conflict resolution (and lack thereof), flawed human decision-making, and much more. If you enjoy lots of science in your science fiction (as I do), this is a great example. I will definitely be pondering the questions explored in this book for quite a while.

4.5 show less

Well, this was a fitting novel to read in the Trump era. It’s not even a dystopia, but it’s about a big failure—a colony ship that reaches its destination only to find that the destination can’t be home. The narrator for most of the book is an AI or AIs, depending on how you think about it, and this leads to some interesting perspectives on human intentionality, describing actions rather than decisively identifying mental states—first person limited, if you will. Robinson’s usual rich descriptions are devoted to engineering, biological problem-solving, astrophysics, and wave motions on the ocean. It’s less depressing than it might be, maybe because life goes on for humanity whether we will it or not, maybe because there show more are still people of goodwill trying to talk others out of dumb projects. show less

KSR made his reputation with the Mars trilogy, a hard scifi promethean exploration of the possibility of terraforming Mars. A lot of contemporary serious space exploration owes a deep dept to KSR. And in Aurora, he is repaying that debt with a simple message: Space will kill you DEAD, little ape!

The story takes place on a generation ship nearing the end of its voyage to Tau Ceti, roughly 12 light years from Earth. The ships environmental balance is slowly collapsing, from metabolic rifts, loss of elements to corrosion, and the ways in which the microbiome is out-evolving the 2000 odd humans that sail on the ship. Chief engineer Devi is a Moses-figure, holding the ship together for its last decade of approach, even as cancer ravages her show more body. For unknown reasons, every higher animal on the ship is declining, including humans: children are suffering developmental delays, everyone is smaller, everyone is dying sooner. Only the destination provides salvation.

But Tau Ceti is a poisoned chalice. The best candidate for colonization, named Aurora, is a windy water-world with some aluminosilicates and little else. The first settlement begins to fall to an unknown planetary disease, something like a prion that triggers a fatal allergic reaction. The ship splits into factions, roughly half wanting to continue the mission, the other half wanting to return to Earth. There's a brief and bloody civil war, and the ship physically splits.

The journey back is even more harrowing, a famine that the crew only survives thanks to experimental suspended animation technology. They come into Sol hot, at over 3% light speed, and have to desperately carom through the sun and gas giants to bleed off speed. Finally, battered survivors arrive on Earth in 2900 or so, lost children from the stars.

The story focuses on Freya, daughter of Devi. Freya becomes as close as the ship has to a captain, thanks to a youth wanderjahr through the 20 biome sections of the ship and an attempt to meet everyone. The narrator is the ship itself, a quantum computer that develops superintelligence. Neither are particularly emotionally sophisticated, but the sociology of the generation ship is fascinating, especially in what it conceals from itself. There's the usual KSR rhapsody about space, rocks, surfing, but the tension of the plot makes this my favorite book of his since the Mars trilogy. show less

I like this novel a lot but it doesn't quite make the leap to really excellent, but I'll give it a "really good." I would expect this to be a serious contender for a Hugo nomination this year.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes science fiction with science in it. This is the story of a generation ship on a 170 year mission to an earth-like moon on a planet orbiting the star Tau Ceti. The moon is given the name "Aurora". We join the story with the ship about 11 years away from the destination. There have been a number of generations born (and died) as the voyage progressed. Very believable stuff in here. The story is primarily told by an artificial intelligence - the ship - after one of the engineers tutors it for many decades and near the end show more of her life encourages the ship to create a narrative of the journey.

There's a lot of science in here of all kinds - I think I actually learned a few things although much of it is way over my head. Beyond the hard science there is also the social science. The story is primarily about people, and how the current generation will deal with life and challenges to their starship, aided by the increasingly conscious artificial intelligence that is the ship ... and a sun and planetary system 12 light years away - and once there, how or if they can survive at their new home. Some interesting characters and interpersonal relationships to follow. Most of what we read is the ship telling us the story. It makes for an unusual viewpoint and I found I liked it. The story gets better as it goes, building upon all that has gone before. It surprised me. I wasn't happy at all with the ending but I'm not going to be spoilery to say why. show less

This is about the last two generations of people aboard a 160-year space flight to an Earthlike world. Problems arise, divisions happen. Most of the familiar plot devices of other "generation ship" stories are absent: no one's forgotten what the mission is, no one's deceived about the nature of the ship (*), there haven't been any catastrophes back home, there aren't any advanced aliens. That doesn't make this a better or worse or more "realistic" story, but it lets Robinson focus on the kinds of things he is very good at.

I got incredibly sick of reading arguments about whether the book is too pessimistic toward space travel long before I read it, so I'm not really going to get into that. To me it's a story about people, and a study of show more all those moments when you reach some limit you didn't know you had, or didn't want to have— technological, social, emotional— and fail to get past it, and you'll never be sure if that outcome was changeable or not, but you still have to decide what to do next. Any suspicion that the author is stacking the deck in favor of a preferred objective truth (and I'm aware that Robinson does have his own opinions about the premise) is undercut by repeated reminders that no one really knows— not what's happened, not why it happened, not what's going to happen, and often not even why they feel the way they feel about it. But this fog of subjectivity isn't featureless or thin, it's teeming with energy: love, fear, the frustration of trying to change people's minds, the joy of discovery (even of discovering terrible problems, because they're interesting).

The computer narrator is a good fit for this story: it's got a semi-omniscient and compassionate point of view, but it's never entirely sure of the nature of its own thought process, and it has strong personal loyalties; there's a very moving moment where its ongoing critique of human language becomes extremely dark and cynical, and the strong but never-acknowledged implication is that this is because it's mourning a death.

Oh yeah, also it is a gorgeously written book.

(* Well, almost no one. One of many beautiful little ideas that the narrator refuses to offer a judgment on: there's a small subculture on the ship that's chosen to raise their kids with no knowledge of the universe outside of their home, till they reveal this to the kids to a certain age, which of course freaks them the hell out— and then they grow up and do the same to their kids. They have a sort of paleo-purity rationale for this, but I think there's a fairly self-aware joke there too about our attraction to these narratives: in effect, these people chose to structure their lives around the dramatic reveal that would occur in a certain familiar type of science fiction story, which offers a kind of epiphany that's not otherwise available from the story they're actually in. Another writer might either make those characters a total joke, or make their thing the basis of the whole society and only let a few brave rebels question it, but Robinson characteristically makes them just one of many groups who have to work together.) show less

I always caution that Robinson is not for everyone--but he is for me. And if you like your sci-fi on a grand scale and to be dazzled with ideas and possibilities, then yes he is a good author for you as well.

In his latest book-- a multi-generational starship is reaching the end of its voyage to reach a solar system that could possibly be colonized by humans. We meet the Chief Engineer on the project, her husband and her daughter. We also meet the ship's computer who becomes both a narrator and another character in the novel.

In a way this book is similar to the Martian--any thing that can go wrong does go wrong and things will need to be fixed. But while the Martian generally focuses on one person--well, actually now that I think about show more it, without Devi the chief engineer the rest of the people on the starship would be in far worse trouble.

I enjoyed Robinson's use of the ship's computer as part of the narrative rooted for the computer as strongly as I did for Freya, Devi's daughter and the other hero of the book. The book was in some ways more pessimistic than other Robinson's books. If you read it, I'd like to know if you felt that also.

Question though--why is that after reading two or three of any male sci fi or fantasy writer I can get the sense I can predict what kind of woman is his fantasy? With Robinson it is tall women. I swear, the guy has a thing for really tall, gigantic women. And I always look to see how he'll manage to get characters to stick around in a story that lasts hundreds of years.

That all said--I tore through this book and enjoyed every minute of it. show less