Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson

I read a lot of science fiction in the seventies, so I’ve read a lot of the classic writers of the genre, especially Robert Heinlein and his peers. But then I drifted away from the genre with the exception of time travel novels and alternate histories and, because the Star Wars and Star Treks out there never appealed to me, I’m not real familiar with what’s been going on in science fiction for at least the last couple of decades. Then, I suppose because of all the forced downtime we are all enduring, I decided to look into a few of those “Great Courses” that are advertised all over the internet, and I found one called “Why Great Science Fiction Works,” twenty-four thirty-minute episodes that explore the genre from its origins to the present day. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth episode I started keeping a list of books and authors I wanted to know more about. One of those authors is Kim Stanley Robinson.

 

                   “There’s no new world, my friend, no

                    New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee –

                    You’re tied in a knot you can never undo

                    When you realize Earth is a starship too.”

 

Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora is about what has become known in the genre as a “generation ship,” a space vessel carrying a few hundred, or a few thousand, colonists from earth to a new star that is decades away from earth. By the time Robinson begins telling his story of the 2,122 passengers hoping to find a new permanent home on a star called Aurora, the ship has already been traveling for seven generations. A woman called Devi has become the unofficial “official” chief engineer of the ship, and she is getting worried that the mission will not end well. Everyone looks to Devi for answers to any problems that arise, and the pressure is wearing her down.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson

As Devi sees it, each succeeding generation is inferior both mentally and physically to the one that preceded it. After seven generations aboard ship, the humans are on average ten percent smaller than the original passengers, and Devi is not sure that their cognitive abilities are even that close to those of generation one. Even though Devi’s own daughter is by far the tallest person on the entire ship, Devi can tell that Freya struggles to learn the basic math and sciences that Devi uses every day to keep the ship functioning. What will happen to them when Devi is gone? Devi’s answer is to educate the ship’s computer system to the point that it is capable of making decisions on its own without any human input. She hopes to bring the ship as near to consciousness as possible before she dies. And she does.

 

But, when things start going wrong, and the passengers split into warring camps, even a ship as intelligent as this one may not be able to save them from themselves.

 

Bottom Line: Aurora is a book most definitely best read without spoilers, so I’m not going to go any further into the plot than I already have. Just know that Kim Stanley Robinson is not one of those science fiction writers who ignore the “science” in “science fiction.” There are long passages during which the ship explains to readers the scientific basis for what is happening aboard the ship, and there are many meetings between the ship’s leadership committees that discuss science-based workarounds to problems they are having aboard the ship and on Aurora. Too, the whole last section of the book makes a very strong pro-environmentalist statement about our own planet that will make readers think. Best of all, those hoping for well-developed characters (a shortfall of much classic science fiction) are not going to be disappointed here. Robinson touches all the bases; Aurora is a home run.