Aurora

This was a really interesting experience. As I'm realizing is Kim Stanley Robinson's style, Aurora has two main thrusts: the imagining of what it would physically look like to put a settler colony on a starship and the inevitable politics and fracturing that the group goes through. I get a certain amount of joy just from reading about how the biomes work, the problem of deceleration, the challenges faced on reaching a new planet. True, at points it gets a little over the top with the vocab, and you're reminded that you're reading fiction and not a paper written by scientists who know what they're talking about. But it's still amazing to think about the balances needed to arrive on a new world.

The interpersonal conflicts here feel a little more forced than in the Mars Trilogy, where the motivations and reasoning for different factions had more time to develop. Here, it kinda just happens, and we don't actually have the ability to really get to know any of the people. Partly, this is because so much of the novel is dedicated to the narration by the ship's computer, which has it's own mental development and associated doses of feels. As an idea, I'm glad to see it explored, even if we lose some of the actual human character development.

The last thought the book leaves you with is the analogy between the starship and Earth. After all, our planet is really the same, just bigger; hurtling through space with finite resources and a crew that can't agree on how best to proceed. It's an interesting filter to look at Earth through; I realised I had a tendency to yell at the starcrew to just get along, when I don't think anything is remotely that easy on Earth. Ultimately, this was a mishmash of fun ideas and a good read, if not as coherent as the Mars Trilogy or 2312.