Aurora

Qua standaardverhaal kan het tellen: het generatieschip op weg naar een andere planeet.

Als ik daar geen paar dozijn boeken en verhalen over gelezen heb, heb ik er geen één gelezen.

Maar dit is wel één van de betere in het genre. Er zijn echte personages, het schip wordt mettertijd ook een personage, en het heeft een begin, een midden en een einde.

In het begin van het boek komen we bijna aan op Tau Ceti, en is het hoog tijd dat ze aankomen. De microben en bacteriën en virussen aan boord evolueren sneller dan de grotere beesten en de mensen, er zijn wel degelijk gesofisticeerde 3D-printers die vanalles kunnen maken, maar sommige grondstoffen raken op, enfin, het schip loopt eigenlijk op zijn laatste poten.

En dan, zonder veel van het plot te verklappen, gebeurt wat eigenlijk te voorzien was: er gebeuren onvoorziene dingen.

De rest van het boek is probleemoplossen. Een beetje The Martian dus, maar met meer personages, meer op het spel, en vele keren meer literatuur dan The Martian – dat voor al zijn wijs zijn toch wat MacGyver In Space was.

Een mooi boek, met een logisch maar daarom niet minder mooi einde.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I really enjoyed Aurora, it's one of those books set on a generational ship. I've found that most books like this usually occur about halfway through the journey and almost always have some sort of plot twist. Aurora is different because it does not have a plot twist and deals with what happens when the ship gets to it's destination.

One thing I found great about it is that the main character is mentally stunted, it's never properly explained what her problems are, though we learn that it may be caused by living on the ship. The thing I love about this is that her disability is not the whole point of the story, it's just something she has and despite having it, is still able to get on with her life just like everyone else on board.

Now this book is a hard sci-fi, I love hard sci-fi and I really enjoyed all the science-y bits in this, but I found some parts were just a little too technical. I ended up skipping pages because I didn't understand the physics. I still enjoyed the book despite this but it was annoying that I had to skip bits.

My only problem with this book was the final section. I'll try to not give away any spoilers but I basically thought it didn't do a very good job of wrapping up the story. It almost felt like this final section should have been cut during the edit. It left me with more questions than answers. The actual last part of this book wasn't even a proper end, it sort of just stopped. I don't know if that means Kim Stanley Robinson is going to write a sequel or what. But yes, apart from the ending (which was a bit of a let down) I did enjoy this book.

Science fiction er ofte spennende historier skrevet av dårlige forfattere eller dårlige historier skrevet av dyktige skribenter. Her møtes god historie glimrende stilsikker forfatter i en historie om hva som skjer med den første interplanetariske reisen fra jorden til et annet solsystem. En god del tanker jeg ikke har tenkt før, og en type sci-fi som ikke forsvinner i drømmer, men er godt forankra med begge beina i potensiell virkelighet. Boken begynner og slutter i vann, og en av fortellestemmene er en kvantedatamaskin med personlighet. Utrolig nok troverdig som rakkern, og i tillegg har boken et økologisk perspektiv som er skremmende og tankevekkende, og aldri før har tanken slått meg at vi lever i den beste tiden menneskene kan leve. Etter oss kommer teknologien og klimakrisen.

Your great grandparents signed up for a trip across the stars. Now, enough time has passed that you are the generation flying in a ship that has traveled for a hundred plus years. Space Travel always seems like the next frontier, but this book asks the question is it possible, is it fair?

Sidenote, there is an interesting section in the middle that models what happens when the majority has a mob mentality. It's not meant to be a political potshot, but it is interesting considering our times.

I wish the ship ending would have been a little different.

I loved this book. I could waffle on and on about what I think this book is trying to convey about humanity and what drives us and what not. I loved the narrator and the development the narrator makes over the course of the book. You can just see it in the writing. It's always fascinating to me when a writer attempts to have a character apply logic and reason to human emotions and behaviors. I feel like a lot of insight can be discovered when you attempt to analyze humanity in that way.

I was skeptical of another Kim Stanely Robinson book. I read Red Mars but it had a hard time hooking me and it ended up taking me years to read. It was enjoyable in the end and I plan on finishing that series but I didn't think I'd love a book by this author as much as I ended up loving this book.

It can get very overly descriptive in certain points. Almost fetishizing the wind and water but the pay off is worth it.

Highly recommend.

This is on the surface a very sciency book about the challenges of traveling to other worlds, with a strong message about our place in Earth's ecosystem and the beauty of our little blue world. On that level it succeedes, but that is purely a vehicle for the real narrative, without spoiling anything this book is truly about the double question of “What is life?” and “What is love?”. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that this is a SF book with a romantic subplot - no this book seriously delves into the philosphical aspects of these questions to the extent that this would better be called Philo-Fi rather than Sci-Fi. If you enjoy empasssioned questioning soliloquies about the meaning of life - this book is for you. Personally I loved it.

This is a space opera story that a bookclub of mine was reading. I would not have normally picked it out. It started out a little slow and then picked up. The middle was a little drawn out but I think it needed to be because of all the science being explained. I tend to glaze over a little when there is too much science being explained but in this case it was well done and not too dry. The ending was a little weird and I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. (view spoiler)

Kim Stanley Robinson is an author who has been on my to-read list for ages, but I've always been a little too intimidated by his reputation to pick up a book on my own. I was pleased that my book club finally chose one of his, and the stand-alone Aurora definitely proved my fears baseless. I'd thought the science would be too overwhelming for me (and it is), but the characters and the very human story shaped by that overwhelming science more than compensates for occasional jargon overload. What's especially fun is that, while I'm used to lengthy explanations of technical and physics babble, this book focuses on the biology angle.

The book deals with a generation ship carrying multiple biomes through space for hundreds of years to populate a new system. During their journey, they experience island syndrome as genetic diversity is hard to come by. There are bacteria that they brought with them (intentionally and unintentionally) that don't act as they should. There are bad harvests and sick animals and tons of crises that happen all the time when you involve living organisms, crises that can be coped with here on Earth for which the organisms were designed, but far more difficult when you remove them.

It also deals with Artificial Intelligence in a unique way The ship is run by a quantum computer which most of its residents fully admit to not totally understanding. Their best theory is that people were so excited about the fact that the ship worked, they volunteered to be sent off to space without really caring why it worked. Over the course of the novel, the computer thinks more and more independently, acts independently. It has the best interests of its residents in mind (it thinks) but is also aware enough to know it might not know the best interests of its residents. I've never read AI fiction quite like this, and I definitely enjoyed it.

Also, powerful, smart, resourceful women in space. Always a plus for me.

I'll admit to being a little disappointed in the ending. It seemed a little bit over the top on the metaphor scale, but I think it was also a decent way to leave these characters I'd spent a generation with. If you like space odysseys where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, this is defnitely a book for you.

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.

The low rating I've given this book is really just a reflection of my appreciation (or lack thereof) for this type of story.

I think the writing is pretty good. I appreciate all the scientific aspects of the story, which remind me a lot of Neal Stephenson's work. But the story itself isn't very compelling to me. The conflicts seem small, inconsequential, and without much tension.

The most frustrating aspect of the story to me is the fact that so little time is spent on/with Aurora, the source of the title of the book.

Executive Summary: An interesting premise, but I found the execution uneven, and I'm not really sure the point of the ending. There were parts I really enjoyed, just not as many as I'd like.Audiobook: Ali Ahn does an excellent job with this book, especially the parts of the ship. She definitely adds a little something extra that makes the audio a great option in my opinion.Full ReviewKim Stanley Robinson is one of those authors whose been on my radar that I just never got around to. I'm not sure if this is the best book to do as his first or not. I found the writing to be quite polished. You can certainly tell he's been at it for awhile.I also really like how he tells the story from the perspective of the ship. It's not done in the same way as [b:Ancillary Justice 17333324 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) Ann Leckie https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg 24064628], but it did add something to the story for me being told this way. The book centers around a generation ship on it's way to colonize another system. It's probably considered hard sci-fi, but I'd put it somewhere between that and space opera. You get into the science a bit at times, but mostly it's about the issues facing a generation ship, and attempting to colonize an alien environment.There were parts of the story I really enjoyed. I liked Freya acting as our camera as she explored the ship and the different cultures that lived there. I also really liked the middle parts dealing with the colonization stuff, and exploring a new world.However, things kind of slowed down for me at times throughout, but especially towards the end. I've seen people say this book could have been ended at an earlier point, and get what they mean. I'm not sure if that would have better, or if there had simply been less time spent on the final arc of the book.Overall, I liked this book and I'm glad I read it. I'll consider picking up another book by Mr. Robinson at some point, but I'm not in a rush to do so. I'd really like to read another book about a generation ship, but one that is more focused on that idea and ideally more space opera than hard sci-fi.

This book hooked me from the very first 20 pages. One of the best generation ship stories I have ever read.

There is such a sense of wonder when the book tries to explore an idea , which is basically impossible to achieve with current technology, while trying to keep the very idea grounded in modern understanding of physics and playing with the speculative tech of the future.

A few thousand people aboard a sentient or semi sentient ship wanting to go far and beyond our solar system to settle and make a new home is the main premise of the book. The plan for them is to terraform one of our neighbor planetary systems (home of the Tau Ceti star) or at least one of the main planet's moon.

All kinds of situation start happening when they find out that things are not going as expected with the biological system of the sentient ship.

I have seen many people disliking the end of the book, but to me it was just excellent. It gave the needed doses of adrenaline and makes you really think about what lies ahead of human exploration and all the risk that comes with it.

Short review: This is a book that is intentionally pushing against the hopeful history of sci-fi space exploration that older sci-fi authors championed. Robinson is has a long and depressing (but fascinating) books on why space exploration is hopeless.

I link to two spoiler filled, but descriptive reviews in my longer review on my blog. Both explain the problems with the book.

In the end I am glad I read it. I appreciated some of the push back against overly enthusiastic space exploration. But I also though there were some holes in the book that were unnecessary.

My full review (no spoilers so a bit vague) is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/aurora/