Book Review | Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our new home: Aurora.

A major new novel from one of science fiction's most powerful voices, Aurora tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system. Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, it is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.

***

Since the startling Mars trilogy, if not in advance of that, Kim Stanley Robinson has been seen as something of a standard-bearer for science fiction—and quite rightly. Again and again in the sixteen years since said series' completion, he's demonstrated himself capable of combining the very finest in futurism with the crucial components of sterling storytelling so many of his contemporaries unfortunately forget.

Aurora chronicles Robinson's return to science fiction in the first, after the about-turn he took in 2013, but to begin with, it reads distressingly like a retread. Its premise depends upon a generation ship hurtling towards the Tau Ceti system, where the two thousand-some souls aboard plan to carve out a new home for humanity—a notion set in motion by the same sort of environmental catastrophe Aurora's author has explored before, not least in the Science in the Capital saga. After their arrival, these cosmic colonists take on the deceptively complex task of terraforming, much as the men and women of the Mars trilogy did. In the interim, they eke out a existence of subsistence in biomes rather reminiscent of those Robinson detailed in 2312—biomes which our central character slowly explores in the course of a long wanderjahr that isn't dissimilar to the walkabout Shaman started with.

But readers? Read on. Because there's so much more to Aurora.

In a sense, sure, it's a bit of a best of. But the best of Kim Stanley Robinson is arguably the best the genre has to offer, and beyond that, the passage of time and a pinch of patience exposes this thoughtful space opera's primary purpose: to chart the rise of an AI.

Book Review | Way Down Dark by J. P. Smythe

There's one truth on the Australia: you fight or you die. Usually both.

Imagine a nightmare from which there is no escape. Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one.

The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive in a hell where no one can hide. The Australia is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs.

But way down dark—into a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead—there might be a way to escape.

***

Calling all authors with plans to ply their darker brands in the young adult market: Way Down Dark is like a lesson in how to bring your fiction to a more sensitive sector without sacrificing the parts that made it remarkable.

The sensational start of J. P. Smythe's Australia trilogy is to sinister science fiction what Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea series has been to fantasy of the grimdark variety: a nearly seamless segue that doesn't talk down to its audience or substantially scale back the stuff some say is sure to scare younger readers away.

To wit, it doesn't get a great deal more miserable than this—appropriately given the tone and tenor of Smythe's other efforts. Consider the fact that Way Down Dark opens on its main character murdering her own mother a macabre case in point.

It was because she had a reputation. Her reputation meant that I was always left alone, because so many others on the ship were scared of her. Only when she became sick did that change. Not that anybody knew what was wrong with her for sure, but there were rumours. Rumours are nearly worse than the truth, because they get out of control. People started looking at me differently, pushing their luck, sizing me up. They wanted to see just how weak she was now, and how weak I was. [...] Power is everything on Australia. Power is how they rule; it's how they take territory, make parts of the ship their own. But, somehow, our section of the ship stayed free. Somehow—and part of me wants to lay the responsibility at my mother's feet, though I know it can't all have been her doing—we stayed out of it. (p6)

And so a plan is hatched, to keep the three free sections of the ship safe by showing the Lows that Chan and the others under her mother's purported protection should be taken very seriously indeed.

Book Review | Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

What would happen if the world were ending?

When a catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb, it triggers a feverish race against the inevitable. An ambitious plan is devised to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere. But unforeseen dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain...

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown, to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is at once extraordinary and eerily recognizable. He explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

***

You certainly can't judge a book by its cover, but its first sentence, I find, can be tremendously telling—and so it is with Seveneves, the latest doorstopper of a novel to bear Neal Stephenson's name, and his greatest since Cryptonomicon in 1999.

It starts simply: with eleven ordinary words arranged in such a straightforward way that the eye absorbs them almost automatically. It's only when the significance of said sentence registers that the eye tracks back to take in its content more carefully. Still, it takes a few seconds to make sense, for as easy to read as these words may be—as indeed is the entirety of Seveneves—their meaning is a world away from mundane.

This is a sentence so shocking, so appalling, that the brain demands a double-take. But even a second look later, the song remains the same:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. (p.3)

In this way, the extraordinary and extraordinarily complex content belied by the seeming simplicity of Seveneves is revealed, and the fate of something like seven billion human beings is sealed.

In short, Seveneves startling first sentence sets the tone for much of what's to come, but in a novel approximately a thousand pages long, there's just so much to come that it's hard to know where to start, and when to stop. I won't be giving the game away, that much I can say. Nobody's going to hold it against you, however, if you opt to stop reading this review right now—so long as you immediately start reading Seveneves instead.