Aurora

Quite possibly one of the most divisive SF novels of recent years, this starts with a familiar scenario: the launch of a generation ship to transport thousands of colonists – and, ultimately, their descendants – to a distant habitable world. Despite having written Red Mars, one of the best novels about colonizing another world, Robinson has disparaged the idea that any such thing is, in fact, possible or even desirable. In Aurora, he confronts the question of what happens when those descendants, born on a ship they didn’t choose to be passengers on, decide they have a quite different… show more.

Robinson, a science fiction master, has no qualms promoting views that are science fiction heresies. After publishing his acclaimed trilogy about the terraforming of Mars, in Aurora, Robinson argues that the astrofuture premise of science fiction dating back to its earliest days is wrong. The grand goal of evolving beyond the planet is doomed to fail. In Aurora, a generational starship arrives at its target exoplanet, but what seems a promising terraforming mission is stymied. As Robinson said to me in an email exchange, “The new paradigm might be that life is a planetary expression, and away from… show more.