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alibi_shopAurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)
This is about the last two generations of people aboard a 160-year space flight to an Earthlike world. Problems arise, divisions happen. Most of the familiar plot devices of other "generation ship" stories are absent: no one's forgotten what the mission is, no one's deceived about the nature of the ship [*], there haven't been any catastrophes back home, there aren't any advanced aliens. That doesn't make this a better or worse or more "realistic" story, but it lets Robinson focus on the kinds of things he is very good at.
I got incredibly sick of reading arguments about whether the book is too pessimistic toward space travel long before I read it, so I'm not really going to get into that. To me it's a story about people, and a study of all those moments when you reach some limit you didn't know you had, or didn't want to have— technological, social, emotional— and fail to get past it, and you'll never be sure if that outcome was changeable or not, but you still have to decide what to do next. Any suspicion that the author is stacking the deck in favor of a preferred objective truth (and I'm aware that Robinson does have his own opinions about the premise) is undercut by repeated reminders that no one really knows— not what's happened, not why it happened, not what's going to happen, and often not even why they feel the way they feel about it. But this fog of subjectivity isn't featureless or thin, it's teeming with energy: love, fear, the frustration of trying to change people's minds, the joy of discovery (even of discovering terrible problems, because they're interesting).
The computer narrator is a good fit for this story: it's got a semi-omniscient and compassionate point of view, but it's never entirely sure of the nature of its own thought process, and it has strong personal loyalties; there's a very moving moment where its ongoing critique of human language becomes extremely dark and cynical, and the strong but never-acknowledged implication is that this is because it's mourning a death.
Oh yeah, also it is a gorgeously written book.
***
[*] Well, almost no one. One of many beautiful little ideas that the narrator refuses to offer a judgment on: there's a small subculture on the ship that's chosen to raise their kids with no knowledge of the universe outside of their home, till they reveal this to the kids at a certain age, which of course freaks them the hell out— and then they grow up and do the same to their kids. They have a sort of paleo-purity rationale for this, but I think there's a fairly self-aware joke there too about our attraction to these narratives: in effect, these people chose to structure their lives around the dramatic reveal that would occur in a certain familiar type of science fiction story, which offers a kind of epiphany that's not otherwise available from the story they're actually in. Another writer might either make those characters a total joke, or make their thing the basis of the whole society and only let a few brave rebels question it, but Robinson characteristically makes them just one of many groups who have to work together.
This is about the last two generations of people aboard a 160-year space flight to an Earthlike world. Problems arise, divisions happen. Most of the familiar plot devices of other "generation ship" stories are absent: no one's forgotten what the mission is, no one's deceived about the nature of the ship [*], there haven't been any catastrophes back home, there aren't any advanced aliens. That doesn't make this a better or worse or more "realistic" story, but it lets Robinson focus on the kinds of things he is very good at.
I got incredibly sick of reading arguments about whether the book is too pessimistic toward space travel long before I read it, so I'm not really going to get into that. To me it's a story about people, and a study of all those moments when you reach some limit you didn't know you had, or didn't want to have— technological, social, emotional— and fail to get past it, and you'll never be sure if that outcome was changeable or not, but you still have to decide what to do next. Any suspicion that the author is stacking the deck in favor of a preferred objective truth (and I'm aware that Robinson does have his own opinions about the premise) is undercut by repeated reminders that no one really knows— not what's happened, not why it happened, not what's going to happen, and often not even why they feel the way they feel about it. But this fog of subjectivity isn't featureless or thin, it's teeming with energy: love, fear, the frustration of trying to change people's minds, the joy of discovery (even of discovering terrible problems, because they're interesting).
The computer narrator is a good fit for this story: it's got a semi-omniscient and compassionate point of view, but it's never entirely sure of the nature of its own thought process, and it has strong personal loyalties; there's a very moving moment where its ongoing critique of human language becomes extremely dark and cynical, and the strong but never-acknowledged implication is that this is because it's mourning a death.
Oh yeah, also it is a gorgeously written book.
***
[*] Well, almost no one. One of many beautiful little ideas that the narrator refuses to offer a judgment on: there's a small subculture on the ship that's chosen to raise their kids with no knowledge of the universe outside of their home, till they reveal this to the kids at a certain age, which of course freaks them the hell out— and then they grow up and do the same to their kids. They have a sort of paleo-purity rationale for this, but I think there's a fairly self-aware joke there too about our attraction to these narratives: in effect, these people chose to structure their lives around the dramatic reveal that would occur in a certain familiar type of science fiction story, which offers a kind of epiphany that's not otherwise available from the story they're actually in. Another writer might either make those characters a total joke, or make their thing the basis of the whole society and only let a few brave rebels question it, but Robinson characteristically makes them just one of many groups who have to work together.
