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Wired to Inspire Street Roots • Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2016 Book Review Page 12 ‘Aurora’: Beyond space lies another journey by Ken Nickell complexity of the ecosystem. On the ship it means that diseases evolve faster than resistance to them. People are dying pace — the final frontier? The last sooner, children are showing signs of walk on the moon was almost 50 delayed development and crops are starting years ago, but there’s been little to fail. doubt in science fiction movies and novels Freya, a respected young leader and the that someday humankind will break away main character, proposes they return to from our little planet and colonize others. Earth. For a people who have lived for Now Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the generations believing that the whole best contemporary writers of “hard” meaning of their existence is to colonize a science fiction, has written a book that new planet, this is heresy, leading to a asks a contrary violent split in the group. question: What if Eventually, though, Freya leads some humanity isn’t colonists back. This time, they use a new, meant to colonize experimental cold sleep technology to the stars? (mostly) survive the centuries-long voyage. The plot Their reception on Earth is mixed. concerns a starship The people who support sending out that has taken starships consider them traitors and hundreds of years quitters. The returnees point out that they to reach its were bom on the ship and never given a destination, while choice about being colonists. Faced with generations of the terrifying vastness of Earth, Freya people on it live and compares her experience living in a “A u ro ra ” by Kim die. It finally arrives Stanley Robinson starship to that of a child who has spent at a planet chosen her life in a closet. because it has Other people on Earth are struggling water, a breathable atmosphere and no with the effects of centuries of global native life. But they find it is infected with warming, including a massive sea-level rise. a deadly protovirus, so primitive that it They welcome the returnees when they isn’t detected before some people are realize that they can reinforce their infected and die. The colonists are faced argument against providing rich people an with the choice of taking thousands of escape route from the solar system when years to render a nearby sterile planet the Earth itself needs help. They note that livable or voyaging to another star. even people who spend most of their lives Complicating the decision, the on other planets — most of the solar terrestrial habitats on the starship are in system has been colonized by this time — trouble. mysteriously live longer lives if they return Robinson doesn’t assume that keeping to Earth every few years. The implication plants, animals and people alive on a is that humanity is actually tied more starship for hundreds of years is simple. closely to Earth’s ecosystem than anyone had realized and that this will always be Viruses, bacteria and fungi evolve much faster than “higher” life forms. On Earth, our home. Robinson’s use of ecological insights and this doesn’t matter because of the BY MIKE WOLD Here I’m at my very best, Anxious, angry at the test. A joke is made into a grave; While I’m a toy, I am a slave. I made a message on the street, Some broken glass on a bedsheet Standing comical on a stage I tell the truth, emboldening rage. I’ll take away your burdened me, So you and they can take the lead. Peace and grace and love are found, Though I am now in the foreground. The safety I had hoped is gone. This game won’t end, so we press on, Sabotaged by one & all. All alone I’ll stand to fall. Gathered round are desperate eyes. So I will bear the undue lies. May fear, or love become your guides No place to run, we need not hide I’m unafraid. This work, these prides. How many stolen? How many died? C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T S KIM ■• STANLEY ROBINSON realistic assessments of the difficulties of space exploration sets his writing at a different level from many of the “hard” science-fiction authors writing today. His writing shares some weaknesses of the genre - particularly a tendency to create characters who are types rather than fully complex human beings. Nevertheless, he writes about political conflict in a sophisticated way, which can be both fascinating and tedious, depending on the reader’s tolerance for political discussion. He also goes against the typically technocratic bias of most hard science fiction by making Freya extremely bad at science and math. Her talent as a leader is not that she has the answers, but that she listens well to what everybody has to’say before proposing her own ideas. Robinson does clearly believe that, ultimately, we’ll find our way out of the mess we’re in through technology. One of his most interesting subplots (and best developed character) involves the gradual coming to self-awareness of the ship’s computer. Its self-awareness doesn’t arise so much from the complexity of its processing as from a search for meaning in its life after Freya’s mother, an engineer, sets it the task of writing a literary narrative — this novel — about the voyage. “Aurora” will be satisfying for science , fiction fans,.ending with a 12-year roller- i coaster ride through the solar system as the ship sheds excess velocity. Some chapters rise close to poetry in their writing.. But the novel will also be interesting for the general reader in its exploration and questioning of some of the typical assumptions of science fiction. 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