Kim Stanley Robinson: Aurora

[bibliogramma]

In his latest novel Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on a beloved science fiction theme - the multigenerational spaceship - and turns it into a relentless exploration of the limits of small-scale ecologies and long-term planning, an illumination of the dynamics of human communities under pressure, a profound meditation on the evolution of consciousness, and a celebration of the human will to survive.

As the novel begins, the ship - as everyone, even the AI that controls the ship refers to it - is nearing the end of its long journey to Tau Ceti, where the plan is for the roughly two thousand inhabitants to attempt to start a colony on Tau Ceti E's moon, which they have already named Aurora. The first section of the book focuses on the family of Devi - the closest the ship has to a Chief Engineer - her husband Badim and child Freya. Through Devi's eyes we see how narrow the survival margin has been, as imperceptible imbalances in the original ecological design of the ship have magnified over time, testing her ingenuity to its fullest as she struggles to diagnose and repair one malfunction after another. Further, in the ship's closed system, microbial life has mutated faster than the larger lifeforms, and the consequences of this have not all been beneficial. The initiation of deceleration has made subtle changes in the forces acting on the mechanical parts of the ship. Over time, the accumulation of minor shifts have taken the ship and its lifeforms closer to the brink.

Indeed, Devi and others have noticed slow changes in the ship's inhabitants even across the seven generations of the voyage - with people on average being smaller, slower to develop, a little less capable of grasping complex intellectual concepts - as if humans too, affected by the growing entropy of such a small-scale world, have been falling out of balance.

As arrival at Aurora grows nearer, Devi sets the ship's AI an unusual task - to write a narrative of the journey, not as a reportage of facts and figures, as a computer might, but as a story, as humans might tell it. The central portion of the novel represents the ship's - or more accurately, Ship's - attempt to do just that, and in the process we see the transition of Ship from AI to full, conscious personhood - or something so much like it that no Turing or Voight-Kampff Empathy test could ever tell the difference.

As the narrative progresses, Ship selects Devi's daughter Freya as the focus of the story, and indeed Freya becomes in some ways a crucial character in the events that follow upon the ship's arrival in the Tau Ceti system.

The novel is in its own way both deeply pessimistic and triumphantly optimistic as it presents the essential, indomitable stubbornness of humanity in the face of a vast and indifferent universe, and its own limitations and mistakes.