Aurora
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3.9 • 366 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious hard SF epic shows Robinson (Shaman) at the top of his game. Freya and her parents live aboard a starship that has traveled for generations and will soon reach Tau Ceti, a star about 12 light years from Earth's solar system. Freya's mother, Devi, is the de facto chief engineer, struggling to keep the ship's environment balanced until they reach a new world and, they hope, survive on it. But ecologies are delicate, resources are limited, and the laws of physics are immutable. Over the course of Freya's life, her community faces genuinely surprising struggles for survival, leading Freya to wonder whether it is too late to reconsider a question initially decided millions of miles away and centuries ago: should this ship have been launched in the first place? As always, Robinson is at his best when dealing with large populations, scientific questions, and logistics, and the very human characters are more than afterthoughts. Even an occasional lapse into preaching about the philosophical problems with space exploration can't mar this poignant story, which admirably stretches the limits of human imagination.
Customer Reviews
Great story; flawed execution
The underlying thesis of this novel - the problems of generation starships and the overall hostility of the universe- is excellently told in a thoroughly believable way. The problem is the pages and pages of absolute waffle that does nothing to advance the story. I found myself skimming pages just to get back to the actual story, and that’s a shame. It is this endless waffle that dilutes the meaning of the ending: it just drags on and on, until it just stops. Then you realize the actual ending of the book was a hundred or so pages previously.
I wanted to love this novel; instead I only just like it, and that’s after reading it twice (over a year between reads), and part of the reason I only just like it is I needed to get Microsoft Copilot to explain the significance and underlying theories of the folded protein. I shouldn’t have to do that; the main character needed to ask that question on behalf of the reader.
So, three stars from me: 5 for the incredible thesis that makes sense; -2 for the amount of non-story that didn’t need to be there.
A sermon dressed up as sci-fi
This book is religious zealotry dressed up in speculative fiction. The author uses 500 pages to make an emotional argument against imagination and ambition using the language of imagination and ambition - and it all amounts to serve a small-minded dogma about what people should venture towards. The plot mechanics are plainly engineered to support his thesis of doing-nothing, even though the writing is pulling towards something greater, something the author repeatedly smack down as to reach the end of their sermon. And if you read his comments on the topic of this book, you will see that it is a sermon and not a real argument. More than one star because some of the writing is good and the take on AI was genuinely fascinating though it petered out with the rest of it.
. A good read. but a disappointing ending.
The first half of the book was fantastic, but then it seemed like the author was just doing extreme of consciousness about some of the characters that I didn’t really care about. I cared more about the story
And the science and the ending was really disappointing