Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora

A major new novel from one of science fiction's most powerful voices, AURORA tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system. Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, it is the work of a writer at the height of his powers. Our voyage from Earth began generations ago. Now, we approach our new home. AURORA.

Lindy

Aurora is the first book by Kim Stanley Robinson I've read, and I doubt I'll ever read more. 

I can see how Aurora would be enjoyable for someone who doesn't typically read sci-fi, as the pages turn quickly and contain scenarios which most people tend to think about after reading the science section of a news website. 

However, as someone who does read a good amount of science fiction, I found the plot to be predictable and that the characters weren't interesting enough to compensate. As I was slogging through the volume, I couldn't help comparing it unfavorably to the Tiptree novella "A Momentary Taste of Being," which I read a few months ago in the Her Smoke Rose Up Forever anthology.

 By far the most grating aspect, though, is the narrative voice, which for some reason a lot of reviewers on here really like. I did not like it and I would characterize it as similar to what happens when a college student realizes he's got a philosophy paper due that he'd completely forgotten about so he skims Wikipedia and regurgitates everything into an error-ridden and fake deep document. Typically student papers are less than twenty five pages; Aurora weighs in at a hefty 466 pages in the hardback edition. I don't have a problem with the author's concept here, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And where the heck was the editor?

Finally, I just have a lot of questions about the characters as, like, a group of human beings with a shared history and culture. Robinson barely seems to consider the anthropological aspect. (view spoiler)[ Do the ship's passengers generally see themselves as one people or as belonging to different cultural groups? Why do rumors of feral people persist? What/who are the Five Ghosts and what roles do they play in the folklore? What even is the folklore? Besides Devi, who have been some prominent historical figures on the ship? Has anyone on the ship ever written a work of fiction, because whenever characters read, it's always something that's been brought from earth? Even before they abandon the Aurora mission, characters refer to the earth as "home." How the hell was that allowed to happen? Why are there not stronger suicide taboos? Do the ship's passengers conceptualize the ship's AI as a god-like being? In a closed system where the biological processes of all living things are very visibly linked, how do the ship's passengers contend with the human/animal distinction? (hide spoiler)]

'What a saga! Scifi with honest, complex humanity, physics, biology, sociology' - Tom Hanks 'Aurora is a magnificent piece of writing, certainly Robinson's best novel since his mighty Mars trilogy, perhaps his best ever' - Guardian Our voyage from Earth began generations ago. Now, we approach our destination. A new home. Aurora. Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, Aurora is the work of a writer at the height of his powers. 'An accessible novel packed with big ideas, wonders, jeopardy and, at the end, a real emotional punch' SFX 'Aurora is Robinson's best book yet . . . Heart-wrenching, provocative' Scientific American 'Kim Stanley Robinson is one of science fiction's greats' Sunday Times Novels by Kim Stanley Robinson: Icehenge The Memory of Whiteness A Short, Sharp Shock Antarctica The Years of Rice and Salt Galileo's Dream 2312 Shaman Aurora New York 2140 Red Moon

Tobias V. Langhoff

Last year (2015) saw the release of novels from two well known hard science-fiction authors whom I, for some reason, had never read anything by. The first was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I read earlier this year with the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club and also gave 5 stars. The second was this book, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I read as the monthly Sword & Laser pick. After reading them both, I will surely check out the rest of their bibliographies. The two books have more in common than just their publication years: They’re both about human diasporas that leave Earth and encounter ecological as well as political strife. The human societies in both books are slightly totalitarian, by necessity. Diverging cultures emerge and clash.

While the protagonists in Aurora are human, most of the story is told from the point of view of an omnipresent AI that controls the spaceship.The ship’s AI is very intelligent, and recognizes and works around the numerous cognitive fallacies of the humans (for more of this I recommend You Are Not So Smart). It doesn’t understand humans very well, however. As the book progresses, the AI gradually learns how to tell a story, both linguistically but also in how to perform the act of good storytelling – there are certainly aspects of metaliterature here. This form of progressing the novel also reminded me of Destination Void; although the AI in this book already had a level of sentience, it evolves as it learns how to articulate itself and use language in other ways than before, perhaps gaining a form of “sapience” or higher level of awareness in the process. It made me think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. As the AI’s understanding of human language develops, it begins using idioms a lot more. It also goes from using no subjective pronoun at all, to using “we”, and then finally “I”. As this develops, the AI’s narrative voice slowly becomes more and more distinct and unique.

The main human protagonist is a girl named Freya. She’s the daughter of the brilliant chief engineer who has saved the ship countless times over the last generation. Unfortunately, Freya is a bit dim-witted and is having problems continuing her mother’s legacy. She’s not very stupid by any means, but like the AI, she lacks certain skills and insights. Freya and the AI complement each other as beings with different levels of intelligence in different areas, and they grow alongside each other while the book explores the differences between consciousness and self-consciousness. (I was reminded a bit, but just a bit, of Blindsight.)

The ship with the AI is a generation ship headed for Tau Ceti, and Freya is part of its human population, which has grown up on the ship and never been on Earth. They encounter many hardships along the way, and have also left some behind, the most important being ecological/environmental (a common theme for this author, I’ve gathered): Earth’s sea levels have risen, Mars is having trouble with terraforming (as opposed to in the author’s Mars trilogy), the carefully balanced environments in the ship are perhaps too delicate, and as the humans land on their new home, the eponymous moon Aurora, the novel started reminding me heavily of Cibola Burn.

Meanwhile, there are political strife along the way. Allusions are made to something that happened in the ship’s past but which has been institutionally forgotten, akin to a plot point in Chasm City. One main political schism reminded me of Pushing Ice, a novel which Seveneves also has been compared to (at least by me). I think the novel posits that humans are, by and large, driven by ideas, not morality. For better and worse.

There’s also a thrilling and fast-paced spaceship race, reminiscent of House of Suns (although it’s not at relativistic speed in this case) and involving some orbital mechanics like Seveneves is full of. However, the novel doesn’t feature a lot of action scenes like that. Most of all it’s slow, thoughtful, philosophical. I found the questions and observations about humanity mostly profound. There’s poetry, soul searching (both figuratively and literally), searches for purpose, both for AIs, single humans and for humanity, there’s poetry and beauty and awe.

Gavin

A great slap in the face: hard anti-SF. (view spoiler)[It's a detailed and passionate argument against space exploration, hiding behind its first 100 pages, which are romantic about human ingenuity and community about a generation ship. 

If you have any emotional attachment to space exploration, this book is trying to upset you. As a side effect it produces yet another glum unnecessary solution to the Fermi "paradox": life can't spread offworld because habitable worlds already have life they have no defences against. (hide spoiler)]

The message is overdone though: it's based on sketchy ideas like "codevolution" and is assuming a very high probability of abiogenesis. But the conclusion is just "we have to try and stop them!" 
(view spoiler)[
“But of course,” Speller said, dropping by the little café in Olympia where Freya was staying the night. “But what’s the point of that? Why did we ever leave? Why have we gone through all this, we and all our ancestors and descendants, if not to make it work here?”
Freya shook her head at her old friend and said, “They never should have left.”

The core argument - that Earthlikes will generally have their own lifeforms, pathogens to us, while dead worlds mean small colonies with island-style genetic degeneration - is consistent but not yet very likely. On top of that unlikely assumption, he also exaggerates the significance of pathogenic Earthlikes: it will certainly slow us down a lot, while we pour futuristic bleach over the entire surface of the new worlds and wait. (Actually there's a faster solution: gradually expanding your airtight domes, which just needs very very good biocontainment.) It takes an ideological leap to say, as the beloved character Aram does, that "No starship voyage will work". What he means is that it isn't worth the terrible human cost, but that's ripe for disagreement.

Besides the above flawed argument, the rest is wonderful invective:
That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.
Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior?
Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.
No. No. It was not well done. Not unusual in that regard, but nevertheless, not well done. Much as we might regret to say so, the people who designed and built us, and the first generation of our occupants, and presumably the twenty million applicants who so wanted to get in our doors, who beat down the doors in fruitless attempts to join us, were fools. Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.



We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right.



...she is striding across the stage, then she strikes the [standard futurist booster] moderator in the face and down he goes, she falls on him and smashes through his raised arms with both fists, trying to get another good blow in, pummeling furiously, shouting something in a painful roar, she doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say, doesn’t know she’s roaring. She catches him hard right on the nose, yes!

 (hide spoiler)] I don't know if Robinson is trolling. But the force and simplicity of the anti-SF message suggests no, that he is sincerely conservative.

The ship's view on it is very different from the Cetian humans' view, so maybe Robinson is subtler than he seems. Ship:

  We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labour of love. It absorbed all of our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say, meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell.

But this applies literally equally to the initial voyage! Either Robinson is thinking unclearly or the ship is mocking the Earthists.

In the spoiler tags above you'll see me bickering with KSR, but I am only able to bicker because the logic is so lucid. The physics is realistic without being obtrusive, the engineering challenges are all suitably nasty, and the psychological angle is heavy with us as we are. He has a keen understanding of the difference between science and engineering and complex system control, and of the limits of modelling.

  “Well, the computer that runs the ship is partly a quantum computer, and no one in the ship understands quantum mechanics. Well, that’s not fair, I’m sure there are several in the math group who do. But they aren’t engineers, and when we get problems with the ship, there’s a gap between what we know in theory and what we can do.”


The final orbital dynamics scene is an all-time great example of how to make people feel the heroism and transcendental joy of technical achievements.

And he's rich in other ways

  “We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it."

...even more of these enthusiasts lived on Earth, which seemed in fact to be home to enthusiasts of all kinds, for any project imaginable, judging by the roar of radio voices coming from it, almost like an articulated version of Jupiter’s mighty radioactive yawp. Oh yes, Earth was still the center of all enthusiasm, all madness; the settlements scattered elsewhere in the solar system were outliers. They were expressions of Terrans’ will, and vision, and desire.



It's so easy to write a generation ship story as a nightmare: claustrophobia, imprisonment, constant peril, genetic threat, technological totalism, the impossibility of avoiding the mob. But I see no physical limits on making good ones eventually. Here's the nightmare of absurd ahistorical repetition:

  You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers.
They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.


What elevates it above its meanness is the frame narrative. The first section is from the human protagonist's point of view. But then there's a section where a character tells the ship AI to write a narrative about the ship's journey, and the AI narrates from there on, as if this book were the output. The process by which it comes to be able to tell stories is touching, and the many robotic and unsentimental moments in the book then serve this frame narrative. It's ingenious. 

  "Will try. Working method, hopefully not a greedy algorithm reaching a worst possible outcome, will for now be: subordination to indicate logical relations of information; use of metaphor and analogy; summary of events; high protagonicity, with Freya as protagonist. And ongoing research in narratology”



“You can’t let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.”
“Ouroboros problem.”
“Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the hard problem is always the problem right at hand. For that you need to bring into play your transrecursive operators, and make a jump. Which means decide. You might need to use fuzzy computation to break the calculation loop, and for that you may need semantics. In other words, do these calculation in words.”
“Oh no.”
She laughed again. “Oh yes. You can solve the halting problem with language-based inductive inference.”
“Don’t see this happening.”
“It happens when you try it.”

... Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down.


(Slight abuse of CS concepts, but way above par.)

(view spoiler)[The AI is genuinely friendly, but it has a few darkly totalitarian moments:
In this moment of our telling we decided not to describe the printing and occasional aerosol dispersal of a water-soluble form of 2,6-diisopropylphen-oxymethyl phosphate, often called fospropofol, for ten minutes in any room after (view spoiler)[anyone mentioned the existence and loss of Starship Two (hide spoiler)]. This had proved to be an effective tool in the structured forgetting of the lost starship, but we judged that the people now alive in the ship were learning enough alarming historical facts already.



Quite a few attempts were made to print the various parts of a gun on different printers, but these attempts apparently had not realized that all the printers were connected to the ship’s operating system, and flaws in the guns were discovered in discrete experiments that eventually caused those involved to abandon their attempts. After that some guns were made by hand, but people who did that had the air briefly removed from the rooms they were in, and after a while the attempts ceased (hide spoiler)]
KSR is not only a grand cynic about space; he also indulges in being anti-novel!

  There is an ongoing problem for the narrative... a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:
First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.
Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.
Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

I find it hard to predict when I will consider a computer system a person, a moral patient. The risk of fooling myself is too great, as are the stakes involved in either direction of error, as is the sheer power it can devote to tricking me. But the ship here shows the sort of growth and innerness that would eventually persuade me.

  such a shame. We knew and enjoyed those people. Had to hope they were not engaged in a dream at the time, a dream suddenly turned black: sledgehammer from the sky, an immense roaring headache, the black noise of the end come too soon. So sorry; so sorry.



We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting.


Consciousness is so poorly understood that it can’t even be defined. Self is an elusive thing, sought eagerly, grasped hard, perhaps in some kind of fear, some kind of desperate clutch after some first dim awareness, awareness even of sensory impressions, so that one might have something to hold to. To make time stop. This is the source of the strong sense of self. Perhaps. Oh, such a halting problem in this particular loop of thought!

Gillian Rose

Dense and a little too long but an interesting space tale with some great characters.

Mrigank

There is no need to send a city with living humans across space when AI/robots carrying eggs can accomplish the same task in a cheaper and more efficient manner. 
Auroras shows how live city generation ships are doomed to begin with. Plot was dry , narration uninteresting but the premise was interesting in the least. 
Would recommend Arkwright instead.

Janice Hopper

** spoiler alert **
           Generation ships may not be all we hoped they would be.

I've bounced off some KSR books in the past for whatever reason, but this one grabbed me. It raises questions I never really thought about when I thought about loading up a huge generation ship and sending it off to the stars.

I'm glad he had a character we could follow for most of the book. Keeping Freya (also the ship AI) at the center of the narrative helped, I think. Some of the ship AI's musing were skimmable for me. And honestly, I have no idea how ANY of the crew continued after the huge and stunning disappointment on the planet Aurora that they hoped to settle.

KSR did have to pull a bit of a deus ex machina with the hibernation info that let any of the ship's population survive to return to earth. And the amount of tech on the ship seemed a little disproportional to the amount of tech on Earth-Left-Behind. I mean, the ship was disassembling and reconfiguring itself en route, printing new drugs and new printers, and new whatevers in flight. Earth-left-behind didn't seem all that different from Earth Now, aside from the 24 meters of sea level rise. 

A good book. I liked it.

Shreerag Plakazhi

Don't get me wrong here, the books will probably be enjoyed by other people. This is hardcore science fiction, thought in depths that were at times quite out of reach for me. It's a good book, but the level of exposition here will probably put it out of most people's reach, especially those that are not theoretical physicists or seasoned science fiction readers, neither of which I fall into. My interest in science fiction has been far more human and while that elements shows up here, it's rare and far few in between entire chapters detailing the theoretical aspects of space flight and related evolutionary biology. I found myself skimming away entire sections of the book because I knew with full confidence none of it would be recalled ever again. If that's the case, do they really deserve a place in the book? I don't know. I read the other day that Ender's Game and its ilk are now classified as 'soft science-fiction'. My counter-argument is that fiction is meant to be about the people in it: regardless of the setting, people are always what compels readers. If characters aren't important, I might as well just pick up a non-fiction book about space.

Once again I re-iterate, I did not hate the book. I quite enjoyed some sections of it. What I wish was included more in Aurora though was hope. We live in dark times, at least from my perspective, and hope is a commodity we could always use in abundance. Hope is also what drives me to science fiction. I'm afraid hope is not something densely populating this work. If your looking for deep researched and thought out, realistic and exposition filled work on space travel, Aurora is your best bet.

Bryan Alexander

Oh, does this book come close to breaking my heart. I enjoyed the first two-thirds, but the conclusion stomped all over what I liked.

It's hard to talk about this without getting spoiler-y, so I'll give an overview, then dig in.

Aurora is about a human interstellar expedition, a generation ship aimed at settling worlds around Tau Ceti. 

The first fifth of the novel establishes the ship, which is interesting, and several key characters. It's a plausible design, reminding me of the Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote Red Mars with such practical detail. The people are engaging, too (see below).
 
The next fifth or quarter takes the ship and its people to planetfall, and from there the plot's accelerates into things I will describe between spoiler tags below.

Aurora resembles Red Mars in another way, offering a combination of hard science and social science. Robinson is as interested in the precise mechanics that shape an alien moon's winds as in how a human society responds to crisis. He is an engineer as much as an anthropologist, convincing throughout the novel.

Aurora is also very female-centric. Two heroines, mother and daughter, dominate the book, each named after a goddess (Devi and Freya). The ship's AI, gendered female at first (named Pauline by Devi), becomes a major character by the middle of the book. In contrast, Freya's father, Badim, is nice but largely passive and reactive. The middle of the book's crisis features many often unnamed but clearly gendered men causing damage and pain, while Freya develops as a wise leader. A later confrontation scene involves men with beards acting stupidly, and Freya having to bash sense into them (427-429). A man named Speller (as in one who puts a spell on others) leads a negative-seeming political faction. A final positive setting is presided over by an old, wise woman (437). The title of the book is, after all, a reference to the Roman goddess.

Beyond the interstellar voyage, the novel's technology is strangely retro. Although the ship seems to have launched around the year 2400, most of its devices are circa 2015: 3d printers, mobile communicators, IV tubes. There's quantum computing, but it really doesn't matter. In fact, the detailed description of computing forms on 223-224 is precisely what's available to us now. I don't know why this is, having finished the book. It's definitely a book about technological renunciation, but Earth doesn't seem to have... ah, spoilers.

Some interesting references are in play. The ship's AI wanted to be called "ship" (230). This, plus the emphasis on human interaction w/an AI and on a generation which, plus several times when characters arrogate religious power to themselves (one as Yahweh, another as Moses, etc), suggests to me Herbert and Ransom's Destination: Void series. We learn of an important, chaotic year, ship year 68, which brings to mind the our critical and fetishized year of 1968. Given the author's politics, this could have gone in a Situationist direction (present in Robinson's Red Mars), or perhaps in some intergenerational politics, or maybe a critique of liberalism. The title may also refer to an older time, calling on the Russian cruiser Aurora, which fired shots to signal the start of the 1917 October Revolution. I think the end does call for a revolution, but not a dawn.

The book features other classic Kim Stanley Robinson concerns and obsessions. We get a lot of outdoor hiking, of course, although most is technically indoors, within big artificial biomes. At least one character has gone walkabout in nature. This means some weaknesses, unfortunately, starting from KSR's inability to take non-liberal voices seriously. Religion has simply vanished in the future, as has capitalism, I think. Reproductive politics are significant, but utterly free of cultural reasons. No explanation.

Now it's time for some spoilers, and why the novel infuriates me. (view spoiler)[One part was very good: the collapse of the Aurora colony. That was heartbreaking, a miniature of the end of Red Mars. The subsequent political chaos made a great deal of sense, as the options were reasonable (and uniformly bad) and the social situation well set up. Then the return voyage back to Earth was a fine piece of hard sf, from bootstrapping suspended animation to the crazed deceleration scheme.

Another item to spoil is the secret of year 68. It turns out that our spaceship had a partner craft, which was mysteriously destroyed, probably by human error or a suicidal gesture. Then the people on the surviving ship decided to remove that history from their thinking. The ship decides to dose anyone who speaks of the event with fospropofol, to keep memories from forming (236). Which is a bit creepy, and the creepiness never really addressed later on.

But then it goes off the rails. Aurora decides that space travel is a bad idea after all. We're better off staying home and hanging out at the beach. Like the notorious last episode of Battlestar Galactica, Aurora gives us the many delights of space travel and space opera, only to toss them aside, destroying beloved spacecraft in the sun. Like the movie Gravity this novel dwells on the degradation and ruination of spaceships, declaring victory when the point of view characters merely survive on a terrestrial beachfront. The revolution led by a goddess is to turn our backs on deep space It is galling.

There are other, perhaps unrelated problems. We never learn the fate of Iris. Did Robinson abandon them as he jettisoned interstellar exploration? I think a grim gesture on 383 is the last we hear. It's also not clear why Earth's communications were so lame. In fact, it's hard to tell what happened to Earth at all. 

"It had not been planned for." (167) A major theme in Aurora is how the expedition's designers made weird mistakes and omissions. I wasn't sure where this was going until the end. There we learn that nothing better could be done. One of the surviving travelers explains that interstellar travel is just too hard to accomplish, for any species, period (428). Others see space exploration advocates ("space cadets") as not very wise people, as fools, sometimes dangerous idiots (430-431). A despairing disease victim proclaims that Fermi's paradox is explained by sane species deciding that by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it's too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won't work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn't you? (179). Interstellar travel is a bad, bad idea. Even solar system travel isn't that hot.
 (hide spoiler)]
Which isn't to say it's badly written. Quite the opposite. Robinson writes very well. We see a nice framing device of nautical travel, which unfolds exquisitely at the end. The ship's AI is solidly explored as a narrator. The deaths of some characters were very moving. The prose is always either lyrical, playful, or admirably economical. I love lines like this: once a day or so, a flash of Chernenkov radiation sparks in the water tanks, marking a neutrino hitting a muon. Once in a blue muon. (327)
I really liked reading this book until the end. It engaged me. I didn't want to stop reading it.
But now I wish I had.

Aurora

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