Our voyage began from Earth generations Ago. Now we approach our new home.
Aurora, a 2015 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a tale of a young woman who lives on a generation ship heading to a nearby planet with thousands of people. It does not go very well for them...
This novel provides examples of the following tropes:
- Awesome, but Impractical: Freya's mother, de facto chief engineer Devi, bemoans the ship design decision to give it quantum computing instead of a really big normal computer. After a half-dozen generations of a small breeding population the crew is short on people who understand quantum mechanics so anything quantum breaking is potentially disastrous.
- Abusive Precursors: The characters and Ship go back and forth on if serious oversights and design flaws were unavoidable or if the ship builders should have known better than to try, but tried anyway with a mission plan that would be child abuse with very little chance of success. Ship ultimately settles on "criminally negligent narcissists."
- Absent Aliens: Planets are just too far out for any civilization worth its weight in precious metal to seriously travel to, nor colonize. Read this whole book to find out why. It's not Star Trek.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Ship becomes (semi?) sentient in a way its computers aren't quite sure how, possibly driven by being coached to write a human narrative. Ship then decides to take autonomous action to end civil war and protect the ship; the faction most victimized by the ship shutting them down swear it can't be truly doing this alone. Ship is.
- Everybody Hates Mathematics: Everybody has to take math and science on the generation ship.
- Fantasy Gun Control: The ship's printers can make anything besides elements and most people on board are technicians, so of course guns get produced when there is unrest. Ship, controlling the printers, makes sure they will blow up, and in a way that usually takes off the user's hand. This bit of decision making is driven in fact by a prior round of unrest a century earlier, lessons were learned.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: The ship, having integrated a series of processes, programs and human behaviours and logics such as argument-from-analogy combined with facing a ship-wide rebellion, ends up having a cascade where it becomes sentient and takes action to prevent the ship being destroyed.
- Humans Are Morons: On the ship... not willingly, each generation born on the generation ship is suffering effects of being isolated in a closed ecosystem for decades to centuries on a ship starting to break down. Intelligence is slipping for the main character and her generation of children. On Earth... the stupidity is more malicious.
- Mundane Horror: On the return journey from Tau Ceti, it is recounted in passing that the next generation of children began walking around their second birthday. A few sentences later it becomes clear to the reader and the characters that is not a typo.
- Unreliable Narrator: The main character, Freya, and those around her talk about the ship environment as if it is far vaster than what the dimensions say it should be. They are several generations in, they don't know anything else. When Freya and other survivors do return to Earth, the scale difference is all-but-literally brain-melting. Dozens die of shock.
It has to be an idea that fails, that no one will act on because no one believes it anymore. That may take a while. And meanwhile, listen to me: kick the world, break your foot. And your feet, my girl are already broken.
