I think I’ve
said this before but Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the greatest
authors of our time. And he has done it again with Aurora. This is
a book I could not put down! Kim has an adept and uncanny ability
not only to describe the complexities of interstellar travel, but to
penetrate into the very heart of the human condition and all its
vagaries.
Aurora is a bittersweet journey of a
group of humans who are the descendants of ‘astronauts’ on a
generational ship set to colonize a known exoplanet. The ship, named
Aurora, and endowed with AI, has been on its journey for couple
hundred years. It has two habitat rings which mimic various
ecosystems on Earth, such as jungle, deciduous forests, savanna,
arctic tundra, desert, etc. Aurora also has sections for rockets,
storage, energy generation and a magnetic shield to shield itself
from interstellar dust. There are approximately 2000 humans on board
with several species of flora and fauna.
The protagonist, Freya a young woman,
and daughter of the ship's chief engineer, shows signs of gigantism.
She is really tall. And apparently, gigantism is one condition of
island evolution. Island evolution happens when an ecosystem is
isolated much like islands on Earth, often resulting in gigantism or
dwarfism. There is evidence that this is happening on the ship
within the human population. Another blight that is happening on
the ship is the human IQ has been declining on subsequent generations
of the ship. The leaders of the population, including Freya's
mother, do not know why. Evolution Link Here
Most of the humans are involved with
food production, but others are technically inclined so they are part
of a crew that maintains the ecosystems and the ship itself. The
ship's chief engineer, Devi, interacts with the ships AI. In fact,
the AI seems to narrate the story from time to time, an interesting
twist on story telling.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
Over the course of time, the ship’s
ecosystems are failing due to multiple issues, such as pH,
contamination, lack of a certain mineral or too much of a certain
element in an ecosystem. These issues have taxed the crew, but they
eventually arrive at their destination, the planet Tau Ceit Prime.
The brave humans begin to colonize the planet, but it turns out the
planet has some sort of prion that sickens the settlers and
eventually kills them, rendering the planet uninhabitable. As a
result, a division happens among the humans.
Some want to stay and try to habitate
other planets within the system. There are no habitable planets
within the system, so they are stuck making dome habitats. While
others want to go back to Earth, however, this presents a problem,
since the ship is in need of repair and some of the ecosystems are
failing. We can see their situation is dire. A ‘civil war’
breaks out with loss of life, eventually they agree to part ways.
With some staying while the rest deciding to use what they can to
salvage the ship. There is not enough viable ecosystem left to
support the human population on its return journey to Earth so they
build cryo-pods. These cryo-pods would freeze the travelers in
suspended animation for the roughly 300 year journey back to Earth.
Eventually they return to Earth.
However their reception is with mixed emotions. Finding their destination planet not habitable, this band of humans have risked life and limb to return to the only planet they know that is, Earth. It becomes a rude awaking finding that Earth is not their home. They are human however, but born on a generational ship with high aspirations to reach the stars, coupled with astronaut bravado and humanity's insatiable desire to colonize other planets; these humans are seen as failures and soon find themselves ultimately rejected by humanity.
The story telling is impeccable. Having desires to explore the stars myself I was deeply connected to the humans of Aurora. My heart reached out to Freya and all her trials and tribulations. Having survived the trip back to Earth I was crushed to read that Freya and her band were seen and treated as failures. They should have been celebrated as heroes, as explorers on a scale much more sophisticated and with much more grandeur than Magellan or Columbus, the dream of every astronaut, for they went to another solar system and returned and survived! A fantastic ending to a fantastic story, well done!!!
