Aurora

Product Information

The plot blurb sounded perfect for me and every exciting, but, yeah… I really miss judged the genre of this one! No machines to keep patients alive, babies in icu alive, people dependent on power to run their wheelchairs, heart machines. Terrifyingly plausible, this apocalyptic tale focusses on one family and their trials and triumphs in the face of horrifying odds.

This full-colour reproduction of Aurora’s personal notebook also features all song lyrics from the album, as a beautifully presented cloth hardback with gold foiling. But I think what gets to me is this: I don't understand physics, so I read through most of The plot of Aurora, which begins just as a multi-generational trek across the galaxy is about to reach its destination, shows a lot of promise. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.Freya knows that she is not her mother; she lacks her mother’s brilliant, glittering intellect and Devi’s ability to see the whole picture. Yes, these may be classic tenets of the space exploration canon, but fear not, fellow traveler and science fiction fan– Aurora is like no other generation ship book you’ve ever read. During its long life, Ship has seen fifteen thousand humans (and even more animals, and many, many more bacterial and microbrial life forms) live and die in its rings, spires, and biomes. Born into Evangelical trailer trash poverty, Aurora finds her way into an elite prep school where she’s drawn into a circle of girls who form a Surrealist coven.

Devi, the ship's de facto chief engineer and leader, is concerned about the decaying infrastructure and biology of the ship: systems are breaking down, each generation has lower intelligence test scores than the last, and bacteria are mutating and evolving at a faster rate than humans. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. Why not spend some time and effort trying to see if they could build a cure or a resistance to the prion? Thus to get there will take many generations, and indeed more than 150 years have passed when the novel actually begins.I mean… For what happened to cause the cluster fluff in the first place, I don’t know… again, just felt too…. It soon becomes apparent that extraterrestrial life is present in the form of primitive prions, which infect and kill some of the landing party.

Which would be okay if interesting things were happening, but possibly because I didn't care about the characters, I couldn't bring myself to care about what they were doing, either. This book explores the impact of the earth being affected by a solar event which wipes out all electricity.Soon, the human explorers born among the stars will face their greatest obstacle, and the first real choice they’ve ever had to make as a group. Robinson's criticism of the assumptions modern SF takes for granted - the false teleology of scientific progress, that anything that can be theorized will one day come to pass - is one I can appreciate.

But the complicated history between the siblings is far from over, and what feels like the end of the world is just the beginning of several long-overdue reckonings—which not everyone will survive . The main characters are a family of three, fiery Devi, the de facto chief engineer and leader on board, her calm husband Badim, a doctor, also on the security council, their mixed-up teenage daughter Freya.Soon they hear rumours of riots, the struggle for food becomes real, and even within their small communities, the rule of law is collapsing. There’s Aurora, the crew’s best possible shot–a water world and Earth analog, with the right composition, mass, and likelihood of supporting Terran organisms. Other intelligences or life may have the ability to travel to the stars, but it’s a farce–because the type of life supported by one world will not be compatible with another. From the very first page, Aurora succeeds, excels, as a story because of its unexpected narrative in both structure and substance. Aurora is much more low key, the story of a solar flare that wipes out all power and technology across most of the world.