Review: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

[This is an excerpt from my review on SF Signal 7/7/15. Read the entire review here.] 
 

Aurora is the first of Robinson’s books that I’ve read, and now it certainly won’t be the last. I started the novel knowing that it had something to do with space travel on a generation ship, and the search for other habitable planets, but I never expected such an in-depth, detailed, and downright vast exploration of the implications of human space travel and relocation.

Some of you, I assume, will think about Battlestar Galactica, The Martian Chronicles, Severance, and the like while reading Aurora, and rightly so, since stories of humans setting out to find a new home run throughout American sci-fi. What makes Aurora stand out, though, is just how far Robinson takes the narrative: dropping us into the generation ship as it approaches Tau Ceti, following the small group of settlers who test out the chosen moon, then returning with the ship and its remaining passengers (in stasis) to Earth, and finally following the surviving passengers as they set foot on a planet they’ve never seen but nonetheless call “home.”

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