Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Page count: 480

Genre: Science Fiction

“Our Voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now we approach our new home.

Aurora.”

That’s all the summary of the book says. It’s not much to go on, it doesn’t really explain much about the book and makes it feel like a risk reading it considering you don’t know much about it.  But the risk is worth it. Here’s a little summary if you want to know more.

This book is about a young girl named Freya as she travels through space on the spaceship that was created for her and 2,122 other people back on earth 160 years ago. Her world exists in two rings that imitate gravity with an axle in the middle. The rings in total have 12 different ecosystems for all of the people to survive in. The ship is aimed at a star called Tau Ceti, which has many planets that that orbit around it. One of them is a moon that has stable oxygen, water, and no indigenous life. Follow Freya as she travels to her new home. Aurora.

This book was recommended to me by a friend and now I am recommending it to you. I will admit that this book took me a few pages to get into. It spends a lot of the time describing the things that are happening to the ship and how far they are from Aurora and Earth. It felt like an information overload at parts and it started to lag in that aspect. But as the book goes on it becomes more character centered and starts to have an equal balance between information and character driven sections.

The characters are very interesting because they all are very different due to the separation between the two rings and the biomes themselves. All of the biomes seem to have their own people with their own traditions. It really shows how much humans can evolve in a small setting over 160 years. The dynamic between all of the characters are very interesting due to all the differences that they have since all of them are forced into one big ship together.

Now the plot itself is very interesting, a colony of people who need to work together to get to their new home while they have problems themselves. I think that the plot is a very nice idea and it focuses in a really nice topic that has been used before but never really in the same way.

Here is a short list of the pros and cons of this book:

Pros:

Plot is really interesting

Character Depth

Good writing

Cons:

Information dumps every few pages

Need to enjoy space/science

Information can get confusing