But comparisons to The Martian sell Robinson’s achievement very short, for Robinson can write rings around Weir, and indeed around pretty much any contemporary novelist.

In both books, the reader becomes deeply absorbed in the account of resourceful humans solving a string of life-threatening technical challenges in an unforgiving environment. The ship is increasingly subjected to bodge jobs, and so liable to further breakdowns.Īurora has something of the flavour of current spaceman-in-peril bestseller The Martian by Andy Weir. The fixes are desperately costly of labour and resources. In deep space, any of these glitches might lead to annihilation. Valves stick open, biome lakes wash away their beds and start to corrode the fabric of the ship, kilometre-long artificial lights blink out. It is, for one thing, superbly insightful on the way entropy actually works in complex systems how things break down or degrade, the stubbornness of the cosmos, the sod’s-lawishness of machines. In fact, Robinson has written an enormously complex, stimulating novel that gracefully finesses its intellectual depth. It’s hard to summarise Aurora’s story without spoilers, so I’ll limit myself to saying that its apparent simplicity is deceptive. In the hands of another author it might amount to tedious specifying and dry-as-interstellar-dust worldbuilding, but Robinson makes it come thrillingly, grippingly alive. This artificial mind is happy to provide great scads of data about every aspect of the ship. Indeed, Robinson foregrounds the bare facts of this voyage by giving most of his narration over to the ship’s central computer as it painstakingly works towards a de facto Turing test pass. Tau Ceti has many planets, around one of which is a moon with good levels of oxygen and no indigenous life: a perfect blank slate for new colonists.

The ship has been flying for 160 years and is now approaching its target system, undertaking the ticklish business of slowing from 0.1-of-light-speed to a more manageable velocity. Inside are 12 separate ecosystems, from tundra to tropical, each with their own human population, maximised for diversity of flora and fauna. Her world is two huge wheels, spun to imitate gravity, fixed around a long central axle aimed at the star Tau Ceti.

Aurora stanley robinson