Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

 I heard about Aurora through the Good Reads Choice Awards last year.  It was one of the nominees in the science fiction category and the description immediately caught my interest.  After reading and loving The Martian a few months ago, I was ready for another survival adventure in space.  I'm glad to say that this novel didn't disappoint.

Aurora is about humanity's attempt to colonize another planet outside of our solar system (the eponymous Aurora).  The novel picks up when the massive ship that has been carrying the potential colonists is approaching their destination.  The trip to this new star system has taken over a hundred years, so everyone left on board has been born on the ship and lived in its constructed biomes all of their lives.  The novel is mostly told from the point of view of the ship's computer and the plot covers a wide span of years,  mainly documenting the time period during which the colonists attempt to establish their lives on their new planet. Unforeseen circumstances and political conflicts throw them into a struggle for survival, but to say anymore would spoil the story.

This novel truly feels like an epic read.  Using the computer as a narrator allows the story to cover a long time frame.  Traveling into deep space would take generations to achieve, and Aurora does a nice job of conveying that sense of scope.  Most of the action follows one family in particular, but other characters are featured throughout the story as well.  The computer also contributes  its own thoughts from time to time, musing on philosophical topics and explaining its struggle to construct a viable narrative without human help. Character development is a bit sketchy in this novel, and I believe this is intentional.  The main characters do change and grow over time, but the emotional impact of their growth is blunted since their stories are being told by an unemotional computer.  This is more of a story about humanity in general than it is about any one particular character.  The emotional distance achieved through the unreliable narrator prevents the reader from becoming overly attached to anyone; it allows them to step back and become more invested in the bigger picture of mankind's struggle to survive in an alien world.

The plot, while not fast-paced, is thoroughly engaging.  Enough little breadcrumbs are dropped throughout the beginning sections of the novel to gives the reader a sense that there is a larger story going on behind the scenes, and trying to figure out what that story was kept me turning the pages.  I enjoyed the prose style too; Kim Stanley Robinson is clearly a very talented writer.  I consistently felt like the story was realistic to what humans would think and feel on a voyage like this.  Blending realistic human emotions with fantastical story lines is my favorite aspect of science fiction, and this is done masterfully in Aurora.

The only drawback for me throughout this novel was the long sections of description and philosophy from the ship.  The surface of Aurora, the movement of the planets in the different systems the ship encounters, the biomes on board the ship, and many more locations are explained in painstaking scientific detail that was difficult for me to imagine.  It wasn't quite as bad as all of the scientific names in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but it got quite boring.  Similarly, the ship often breaks into the narrative with its own thoughts on topics like human language and consciousness.  I realize that Robinson is using these sections to explore what it means to be human, but I often found myself just wishing that I could get back to the action. These sections are the main reason that I rated the book a 4 out of 5 instead of a 5 out of 5.  It's probable that the descriptions and philosophy sections are meant to be boring and overly scientific, it is a computer conveying them to us after all, but that didn't stop them from stopping the action dead.

Overall, however, I very much enjoyed this novel.  Aurora is an interesting exploration of what might happen if humans had the ability and the desire to travel outside the furthest reaches of our galaxy.  This is an intellectual adventure story, and one that I would heartily recommend to fans of the science fiction genre.