In Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson writes what aspires to be the definitive colonization-by-generation-starship novel, with an emphasis and focus on the implausibility and folly of such a scheme.
(Note:This review atypically spoils a lot of the book as it is a virulent reaction to a lot of the elements in the book I could not otherwise discuss.)
Freya is a young woman who lives on a generation starship headed toward Tau Ceti on a mission of colonization. She’s the daughter of Devi, the best engineer on the ship, a respected leader who is almost single-handedly ensuring the success of the mission of the ship in its final years of its long journey across interstellar space. And Devi is intimately connected to the A.I. of the ship, a quantum computer who is on the verge of sentience, and is tasked by Devi to make sense of the story of the journey to the moon Aurora.
Thus, Aurora tells the story of Freya and the rest of the ship’s arrival at Tau Ceti, and the ultimate return of some of its passengers back to Earth, primarily filtered through the ship AI’s attempt at constructing a narrative of those events. The novel does an excellent job through most of the narrative as a template for how an AI, or anyone else, might learn how to write a novel. There is some meta-discussion within the novel, as Devi tries to teach the AI how to write a narrative, how to vary it, how to focus on a main character
On the surface and through much of the early and mid portions of the book, the novel came across to me as a reader as the definitive story of how a generation starship might complete its mission against the odds and arrive in another star system, to extend humanity to the stars, to land on an alien world and land on it. The novel went into loving detail on how a generation starship would work, the habitats, the societies, the to-be-expected teenage rebellion of Freya as she learned how to grow in the shadow of her fearsome and singular mother. This progressed to the story of how the landing went, and how Aurora, the moon that they have chosen to colonize, is both what they hoped for, and ultimately, turned not to be the eden that they thought it would be.
As the novel progressed, the didactic nature of the novel started to rear its head. The failure of the colonization effort on Aurora launches the remaining ship members into irreducible conflict about what to do next—whether to colonize a Mars-like body in the Tau Ceti system which will definitely not have any hazardous life, to go on to another star system in hopes of finding a better planet to colonize, or to give up and return to Earth. The colonists eventually split into two camps, one to colonize the Mars-analogue, and one to return to Earth. Freya is in the latter camp, and the narrative follows their story.
It is, in my opinion, this last portion of the novel where the flaws of the novel really come out, and the novel completely stopped working for me. The return voyage from Tau Ceti with the remnant population starts going off the rails. A deux ex machina of a technology discovered on Earth and the information sent to the ship, a form of hibernation sleep, allows Freya to be our viewpoint character for when the ship returns to the solar system. There is some fun with orbital slingshots as the ship desperately tries to decelerate, and then the crew, save one, are ejected to Earth and the ship ignominiously dies trying one more slingshot around the sun to slow down. All of the effort and narrative expended on the rise and development of the artificial intelligence of the ship goes up in a puff of smoke with almost casualness. If the AI was not the narrator of this story and effort and love put in the rest of the novel to build the AI into understanding and expressing the narrative of the journey to us, I might not have been so annoyed at the AI’s casual destruction. It felt like insult to injury on the message of the novel.
The very last portion of the novel, as members of the crew die off, and it is not clear who will survive now that they are back on an Earth that has, charitably, very mixed feelings about the returned voyagers, continues this slide. The thesis of the novel is recapitulated and explicated by the idea that any voyage to another star just would not work. Any alien world with water and oxygen would have life and that life would invariably be toxic to us, and a starship could not carry a viable biome with it to another star’s abiotic planet and terraform it in any reasonable time frame.
I cannot recommend Aurora to readers, unless you want to explicitly read a story about, ultimately, how futile and wrongheaded extrasolar colonization would be. The message of Philip K Dick’s Time out of Joint that “One Happy World” is a wrongheaded idea. Aurora seems to suggest that the government of Earth in that novel is precisely right. Earth is our only home, the only environment we’re suited to, and trying to colonize anywhere else is a terrible idea that is doomed to painful failure. We’re better off staying home and trying not to foul our own world that we evolved to live in. It is a novel that posits that every space opera extant is, in the end, not Science Fiction and is, instead, Fantasy, and a strong hint that such fantasies are puerile.
Aurora is a well written novel whose message and thesis made me want to throw it against the wall.
