Joy D's Reviews > Aurora

A spaceship containing around two thousand humans is engaged in multi-generational interstellar travel, a journey of 160 years, from Saturn to the Tau Ceti system. As the story opens, it is approaching its destination. The engineer, Devi, is trying to keep the ship running properly. She is fixing problems occurring due to the length of the trip, deficiencies in design, entropy, and mechanical stresses. Consumables are running low, and destabilizing forces (such as devolution and mutations) inhibit the ship’s ability to maintain a healthy balance of all compounds, nutrients, and lifeforms in the biomes. The deceleration and increased gravitational pull add to the stresses on both people and spaceship. Eventually, a landing party reaches Aurora, a moon in the Tau Ceti system. After this point, any further plot points would be spoilers.

The protagonists are Freya, Devi's daughter, and Ship, the spaceship’s Artificial Intelligence. Devi asks Ship to create a narrative about the trip. The spaceship’s computer is an emerging AI that needs specific instructions (has not yet learned everything it needs to create the narrative, almost like a human child). Ship gets only barebones guidance from Devi, since she has her hands full keeping the spaceship running.

Ship requests permission to focus the narrative on Freya, and Devi agrees, so the initial phases of the story are straight-forward, following Freya’s actions. Freya goes on an authorized “wander” to visit each of the twelve biomes. This construct has the benefit of giving the reader the needed details on the contents, environment, and structure of the spaceship. Ship occasionally inserts observations on its creation of the narrative. Over time, Ship assumes a unique personality of its own, and the narrative gets more complex. I particularly enjoyed the development of Ship.

Robinson examines themes such as the transferability of evolutionary advantages and the ability to terraform rapidly enough to support a colony. It is not a book about characters – they exist in service to the themes. It is more about the larger concept of social adaptation. It also covers psychological stresses, conflict resolution (and lack thereof), flawed human decision-making, and much more. If you enjoy lots of science in your science fiction (as I do), this is a great example. I will definitely be pondering the questions explored in this book for quite a while.

4.5