The more or less omniscient narrator is the Ship itself, which has an artificial intelligence which has been trained or augmented or improved by a member of the crew who took a particular interest, and then tasked the ship with writing a narrative history of the voyage, which as we join it is already around 160 years into a 12 light-year voyage to Tau Ceti, and starting to decelerate. It’s thought-provoking and stuffed with ideas and arguments. Is it the best ever book about a generational starship? No: that would be Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo - but Aurora is pretty good all the same. I needed lots of reading for the summer, and I knew that a KSR novel would be dense and substantial. After a KSR hiatus, I was ready to dip in again. I swore off KSR after reading his novel 2312, which I found turgid and tedious, and so I skipped his recent novel Shaman and wouldn’t have considered Aurora, but for the fact that I stumbled across a Guardian review which praised it as the best ever SF novel about a generational starship.
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