Aurora

New drinking game: take a shot every time they say "reversion to the mean," or Devi says "What were they thinking!?!?"

This is a “worldship” book about humans building a massive ship to travel to other star systems to terraform and colonize a far-away planet orbiting a far-away star. Humanity has achieved the ability to send a ship at 10% of the speed of light, but space is so vast, that even at that incredible speed, it takes about 500 years, or 20 generations, to reach their target destination, which is one of the closer stars to our solar system. This book chronicles the last two generations as they near their destination, and what happens when they get there.

That said…this is not the worldship book that you’re expecting. I’m going to massively violate spoilers in this review, because I think it would actually be really helpful to readers to know what kind of book you’re getting yourself into. You see, for me as a reader, if I read a book about a worldship traveling to a planet that they plan on terraforming and colonizing, I have a pretty big, solid expectation that what’s going to happen in the story is that they’re going to get there, terraform it, and colonize it and live there.

That is not what happens. This is a story not about success but rather about failure and why such a feat might fail, but not for the reasons you might assume. This is no straw man’s argument. This author has clearly done a ton of research on many topics. He gives the benefit of the doubt that we can solve the problem of being able to propel a spacecraft at a fraction of the speed of light, including the fact that in order for a particle collision at that speed would obliterate the ship: they’ve generated force fields to deal with that.

He's also thought through how we could solve all kinds of physics problems due to the Coriolis Effect, and due to the fact that halfway through the flight, the ship would have to start decelerating, and that would reverse the direction of all the G-forces.

He's also thought through how we might reasonably solve all kinds of problems with making a closed system work that enables us to transport a diverse biology, a microcosm of all the biomes on our planet.

In fact, the coolest part of this whole book to me is the just how freakin’ cool this worldship is. It has 24 biomes, arranged in 2 rings of 12 each. Each biome mirrors a particular biome on earth, complete with geological features, plants, water features, micro- and mega-fauna, artificial weather and sun movement patterns to simulate even the change in seasons during different parts of the year…it’s freaking incredible.

In addition, he's thought through problems with genetics, regression to the mean, all the problems with taking a really long journey that takes place over multiple generations...this is really well done high-brow hard sci-fi. It's fascinating to think through exactly how actual interstellar colonization would play out. Politics, sociology, engineering, economics, biology…it’s all here.

This is a coming-of-age story about Freya, the daughter of the chief engineer on this ship. Her mother (Devi) gets pulled into all the various crises that happen on the ship because she has great intuitive, creative debugging skills. She’s not an expert in everything but she’s wicked smart and she knows how to ask a lot of good questions. I’ve known people like this.

Freya isn’t drawn to engineering like her mother. But she’s a very curious child. When she reaches adulthood, she embarks on her “wanderjahr,” a concept they have invented in this culture whereby an 18-yr-old can travel around the ship and live in different biomes for a year, working in different areas, and learn to appreciate the ship and find their niche in society. When she embarks on hers, she also embarks on a project all of her own making. She makes it her mission to interview every person on the ship, asking them what they like, what they don’t like about their situation.

This device is kind of brilliant for multiple reasons. It’s a clever way of allowing us the reader to learn all about the ship without it being an infodump. It also plays into one of the author’s apparent goals for the book, which is to explore the sociology of how people in this kind of culture might interact. Without giving away even more of the plot, I’ll just say that societal breakdown, fracturing, and rebuilding is a key part of the plot, and Freya is one of the most important characters involved in that.

I would be remiss to not also mention that one of the main characters is an AI, who refers to itself as “Ship,” and is in charge of ensuring the success of the worldship’s mission.

In fact, Ship is one of the most interesting characters in the book. Devi (Freya’s mother as well as the chief engineer) ends up making Ship into her best friend early in the book. Devi is a bit of a misanthrope and prefers talking to the AI who can help her with all kinds of problems. She ends up indirectly “programing” the AI because of her relationship: she interacts with it more than any other human, and the AI is made such that its inputs influence who it becomes. One idea that Devi implants into the AI’s mind is the idea that they are probably cruising towards really hard times in the future, and it may become necessary for Ship to take action, to intervene in order to save them all. Ship has never intervened with anything the humans do, and this is tough for her to swallow.

This ends up being very vital to the plot because when society breaks down in chaos, they start threatening the ship’s critical systems, long story short, and so Ship exerts authoritarian controls in order to restore order and prevent catastrophe…but then this introduces a whole tension as Ship ends up needing to take sides in a war, no matter how hard Ship is trying to not take sides. No matter what Ship does, and no matter how democratically and fairly it does it, it benefits one side or another.

Anyways, suffice it to say that there are all kinds of questions explored in this book about AI: what makes a human a human? What’s the role of AI in relating to humans? What is autonomy? What is friendship, what are relationships? And others.

Ok, moving on from that. The most important thing to know about this book is that it isn’t the kind of worldship book that you are expecting. It’s all about showing what can go wrong, and ultimately, huge spoiler, but they encounter major problems with terraforming both of the planets they attempt it on (for very interesting reasons but I will skip over that for the sake of brevity) and, long story short, they actually decide to go back to Earth.

Yes, you read that right. Half of this book is about them making a return trip journey back to Earth, and about what that’s like when they come back. The fact that the plot was turning this direction was really, really hard for me to get behind at first. I was like: what!?!? That is literally the least interesting option they have in this circumstance. That is so lame. This book is about people traveling all the way for all these generations to get to this other system to colonize, and then…they’re just going to go back? Yes, for a hot minute, I was pissed. This book was not at all fulfilling my expectations as a reader, and that’s why I think it’s more fair to readers to let them know ahead of time where this plot is going. I, like many I imagine, am all gung-ho about let’s explore space! Let’s terraform! Let’s do life on other planets! That’s cool, that’s sexy, that’s what I want to see.

Or at least, that’s what I thought I wanted to see. I mean, I did want to see it. But what I hadn’t accounted for is: this author actually has something really interesting to say about why the people on a mission like this might want to go back.

Think about it: at the time that a mission like this departs Earth, everyone on that ship is gung-ho. They are all there because they want to be there, because they think it’s worth it to put themselves through anything in order to give humanity a chance at colonizing other systems. Okay, fine. But this journey is going to last 500 years. So, those people have children. Their children grow up, and their parents die. And they have children, and they have children, on and on for 20 generations. And the first generation chose this for the other 19 generations to follow them.

And as for all the people born into those 19 generations, what is their reality? Their reality is they grow up in a tiny microcosm of the vastness of Earth. They grow up in an environment where everyone must perform a key job; you don’t have the option to not participate in one of the mandatory jobs that must be done to keep the ship and its ecosystems running, because if EVERYTHING doesn’t go EXACTLY according to plan, the whole system crashes and everyone dies. On top of that, they are subject to all kinds of laws that would be considered authoritarian and onerous on Earth. They can’t have kids. The population of the ship has to be kept to tight specifications, and so only a few couples are given permits to have children in each generation. This ends up generating a lot of resentment, perhaps more than anything else, although there is a whole list of other restrictions they are subject to.

And not everyone shares the same vision about colonizing distant places. Ultimately, it’s easier to terraform our own planet Earth than to terraform distant places. And growing up with the knowledge that the rest of humanity back on Earth has all these freedoms that they don’t…that can be hard on a body.

The long story short is, this book explores the collective psyche of a people who were born into something they didn’t choose and resent it. When they come back to Earth, they confront the organizations that sent them out to begin with, and it’s at that point that the whole thesis or theme of the book comes out. You see Freya’s rage against the smugness of the people who sent them out, people who hand-wave at the fact that so many people have to die and suffer to reach their grand vision.

Another element that is explored is that there are evolutionary effects that are poorly understood at best that may turn out to be detrimental to these missions. One such effect is “regression to the mean:” if you handpick a group of the smartest, most talented and creative people to go on a trip and they all have babies, unfortunately, those babies don’t all turn out to be super geniuses. Over time, the population’s traits regress to the mean. People aren’t all these super geniuses at fixing all these highly, highly complex problems they encounter on the ship.

Another problem is that smaller organisms evolve faster than larger organisms. The effect of this is that all the microflora and microfauna adapt to the environment of the ship and mutate and change much faster than the things bigger than them. Humans, which are many orders of magnitude bigger than micro-organisms, basically don’t evolve at all on the timescale of 500 years, while in the mean time, all these viruses and diseases keep mutating and making all the people and their crops and animals sick all the time. New things evolve that can handle microgravity better and can feed off of water bubbles that hover in the air in this environment and all kinds of other weird conditions in a microgravity environment where electricity and water and essentially EVERYTHING behaves differently.

Okay, I’ve waxed way too eloquently at this point. I think you get an idea of this book. It’s an epic masterpiece, and I feel like I’m going to be referencing it many times in the future for my own worldbuilding as a writer. I feel bad for not quite being able to give it five stars, but the fact that I wasn’t at all prepared for the plot being so drastically different from what I expected is just a huge blow against it. In the future, when I re-read it I expect to enjoy it more because I know where it’s going.

If you want a hard sci-fi, truly rigorous, comprehensive and epic treatment of the idea of worldships, this is your book.

I enjoyed this Kim Stanley Robinson take about (the problems of living in) a generation starship. A friend who once saw KSR's WisCon talk about this book recommended it to me.

This is not my first KSR rodeo, so I knew a bit of what to expect from his writing style. It's a bit of a dry, plot-driven story. There's not particularly strong emotional beats. And, it's a vehicle :drum: for KSR's opinions on generation ships, insular biogeography, and the Fermi Paradox.

One thing that I think works very well in this book is that the narrator is the ship itself, having been exhorted to summarize the journey in words by the chief engineer. It can explain away some of why the book focuses on only a few characters and also why it's largely dry and descriptive. (The ship does in time learn to enjoy metaphors and wordplay, like "once in a blue muon".) The ship is probably the best character in the book.

I have mixed feelings about the end of the book, but it's hard to talk about things without being too spoilery. Suffice it to say that I found the penultimate 10% of the book fun and think it would have been stronger to end there before the shift into the more didactic final 10%.

Ho sempre amato l'approccio scientifico e sociologico di KSR. Non si preoccupa solo della fattibilità scientifica, ma anche delle dinamiche sociali. In questo caso, la storia di una colonia sparata verso un astro lontano offre spunti notevoli sui cambi generazionali.

It was nice to read a standalone KSR gem, although I grew tired of the extended swimming scene at the end and the long narrative from the AI that preceded that (would have liked to look in on the other portion of the crew instead). The theme of the book is basically the after-credits scene from "Don't Look Up," which I agree with and appreciate.

Quite possibly the worst science fiction novel, if not worst novel, ever written.

KSR sets out to intentionally deceive you. The author wants you to think this is a book about space exploration, generation ships and the characters within. It is not. This is a book about the author's dislike of space bound idealism. He weaves a fantastic tale, and then right at the end where you would expect to find some kind of resolution to the issues faced by the characters, he hits the whole plot with a hammer. Rather than using deus ex machina to move the plot forward, he uses it to move the plot in reverse. In the span of pages characters invent, find and bs meants that allow them to reverse their journey. The ships computer, the narrator, is destroyed when the ship is thrown into the earths sun, and yet his voice remains to tell us how everyone got back to earth safe and sound to fix earths environmental problems. A tremendous bait and switch, the only ebook I have ever sought a refund for.

Do not read this book if you enjoy science fiction, endings or narrative.

Probably my second favorite Robinson novel (after The Years of Rice and Salt), this one is gritty and realistic, but also intellectually and philosophically challenging. It's much better than his cli-fi and terraforming trilogies, because it's less optimistic and doesn't rely on simplistic solutions. I would have given this book five stars, but the last part let me down. It's like Robinson can't bear to finish his story without resorting to a rainbows and butterflies finale. Oh well, the rest of it is quite good.

I always find KSR books have this initially intriguing and terribly interesting Hard SF aspect - in this case how a generation ship would work - but then I lose interest when that is all the book seems to involve. Problems occur somewhat randomly, solutions appear out of nowhere deus ex machina - and the characters and plot remain under developed and hard to sympathize with. I think in this case 3-4 good plots and stories could have been developed but were merged into one mammoth story covering hundreds of years.

And they abandon a viable planet because of a prion with no attempt to deal with it? this was never a serious option?