AURORA

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel is out of this world...literally. The multi-winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards takes us and 2,122 people on a trip out of our solar system to the single star, Tau Ceti. It’s 11.9 light years away. It will take 170 years and seven generations of people to get there. They are going to the moon, Aurora, orbiting around Planet E. They believe they can quickly terraform Aurora to support their human colony. The story (466 pages) goes through many stages such as: the arrival, the mystery of Aurora, the quarrels and fights between the different factions on board, the cryogenic freezing and ultimately... the final solution. I thought that the author generally kept my interest except when he deemed it necessary to give the reader too much technical information. If you have a Starship and an AI computer running the ship, that’s all I need to know. I’ll never understand all the scientific jargon anyway...so just tell your story, which for the most part, he did. All the main characters were kept to a minimum with everybody in the story having a mononymous name like Devi, Badim or Freya. This style of no last names led to no confusion in the who’s who category.
 
Anyway, the story centers around Devi (the unofficial chief engineer of the Starship), her husband, Badim (a member of the security council), and their daughter, Freya (the eventual  protagonist). As they get closer to their destination, Devi asks the ship’s computer to narrate their journey. “Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.” So far they have traveled for 159 years, 119 days with the ship moving at a rate of one tenth the speed of light. They are purposely slowing down. “The deceleration will therefore be complete in just under twenty years.” Animal and human zoo devolution (things are reverting back to primitive forms) have begun in the ships twenty four self-contained biomes (large nature settings that depicts real countries on Earth). The IQ level of the new born children is dropping. Bacteria is starting to eat at the ship’s seals and crops are starting to fail. These are some of the many problems that Devi faces. The ship’s population is starting to get antsy as they near their destination. Since the ship needs to keep the population down to the original amount, some couples are not allowed to have a baby. Those couples are not happy. Suddenly Devi comes down with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma before they get to Aurora. She has been talking to the computer that runs the ship for twenty four years. Devi is dying.

Devi “taught ship (aka Pauline, or we). She talked to ship, like no one else in the 169 years of ship’s voyage had. Why had the others not? What was ship going to do without her? With no one to talk to, bad things can happen. Ship knew this full well.” After Devi had a sudden bad headache, ER people rushed her to the clinic. Badim and Freya sat tight in the clinic’s waiting room...then there were three doctors standing over them. “We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.” After the memorial service for Devi was over ''Preparations continued for their descent (they arrived!). Down to Aurora, down to Greenland (the name for the landing site), down to their new world, their new day. They were ready. They wanted down.” It was a “New beginning of a new history, new beginning of time itself: Day One, Year Zero. A0.1.” In ship time, 170.040. “Freya’s friend Euan was in the first landing crew...crews had been selected by lottery from among those trained to the various landing and setup jobs.” I’m afraid that’s all I’m going to tell you. This is where the story skedaddles to a thought-provoking ending. The next 350 pages are exhilarating! By the way, did you notice that the author asked most of the questions that I normally would ask in this paragraph?

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: I’ve been reading a lot of sci/fi lately, mostly because authors have been sending me their space opera, or space odyssey to read and review. Kim Stanley Robinson is a different case altogether. He is a preeminent sci/fi writer and I wanted to read one of his classics. But I also want to read his award winning Mars trilogy: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996). Lastly, I would like to read his novel, 2312 (2012). It’s about a colony living in Terminator City on Mercury that suddenly gets attacked by a meteorite. Sadly, I’ll never have the time to accomplish that undertaking.