Aurora

"I suppose New York 2140 might have been a more obvious choice, not least because it offers such a fascinating example of the way fiction can not only engage with the reality of climate change (and indeed the enormous political and economic complexities of it), but also offer a vision of the future that suggests the space for political alternatives. But you could probably say something similar about almost all of Robinson’s novels, right back to the Three Californias trilogy and the Mars trilogy, both of which wrestle with the interconnectedness of politics, history and the environment, and the practical difficulties of building futures that work. In his more recent work Robinson has crafted surprisingly optimistic yet plausible visions of the future: 2312 is another example of the sort of planetary space opera I mentioned earlier, and envisions a future in which Earth’s environment has been profoundly altered by global warming, and in Aurora , a book whose future history runs parallel with that of 2312 without quite coinciding with it, he posits something similar, yet uses it as the backdrop for a much bleaker and in many ways more distressing portrait of the way our fantasies about progress and scientific possibility blind us to the human and environmental costs of our actions. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . To do this the novel takes one of the classic tropes of science fiction – the generation ship – and interrogates it scientifically and politically. The ship in question has spent 150 years travelling from Earth to a planet in the Tau Ceti system (a nod to Asimov). As the novel begins arrival is imminent, and for those on the ship it is the culmination of five generations of effort and privation. Yet almost immediately it becomes clear the planet is hostile to human life. Faced with an impossible choice between dying alone and spending another five generations trying to coax their failing ship home, the colonists opt for the latter, and begin an increasingly perilous journey back through deep space. Part of what makes Aurora so fascinating is the fact that the story is told by the ship’s computer, Ship, an AI that, as the novel proceeds, narrates itself into personhood. Ship is a wonderful creation in its own right, but Ship’s emergence is only one part of a larger engagement – and dismantling of – many of the assumptions about space travel that underpin science fiction. Drawing on epidemiology and biology rather than physics and engineering Robinson suggests closed environments like generation ships are inherently unsustainable, doomed by the rapid evolution of bacteria and other pathogens, and that even if alien planets do sustain life, that life is unlikely to be compatible with terrestrial biology. A number of science fiction writers have taken issue with Robinson’s approach to these questions, accusing him of loading the dice against the colonists. I’m not in a position to assess the science, but in a way that doesn’t matter, because these arguments are actually part of a larger assault upon the fantasy that space travel – or indeed any of the various forms of transcendence science fiction traffics in – is a solution to our problems, or that there are other worlds we can turn to if we ruin this one. We only have one Earth, Robinson is saying, one place exquisitely designed for us, and to pretend otherwise is an act of the most profound ethical negligence. For the colonists that negligence has immense personal consequences, but the novel also allows us to see the way those fantasies infect our relationship with the natural world. “ We only have one Earth, Robinson is saying, one place exquisitely designed for us, and to pretend otherwise is an act of the most profound ethical negligence” In one sense Aurora is Robinson’s most despairing book: even his immense faith in human possibility and the future is strained by the callousness of a culture that is prepared to send hundreds of people off to die in pursuit of what is, ultimately, not just a fantasy but a poisonous fantasy. As one to the colonists demands of those on Earth who persist in seeing something beautiful in the dream of humanity spreading to the stars, “It isn’t just foolish, it’s sick… Ninety-nine per cent sent out to die, as part of the plan? Die a miserable death they can’t prevent, children and animals and ship and all, and all for a stupid idea someone has, a dream? Why? Why have that dream?” Yet despite its deliberate dismantling of so many of science fiction’s core assumptions, Aurora is simultaneously a celebration of the possibilities of both science fiction and the spirit of human endeavour that animates so much of it. Because embedded in it is a vision of something that feels genuinely new, and deeply important: an understanding of the complex interdependence of organisms and environments, and of the ways in which our capacity to recognise or resist that understanding will shape not just our future but our present. The result is a book that is rich in possibility but also deeply aware of the depth of time and the transience of life. Or, as Ship says at one point, “life is complex but entropy is real.” Absolutely. He’s very explicit in his optimism about the future, which is partly political and partly a function of the awareness that history doesn’t stop happening that’s embedded in all his work. Whether that’s something we’re not used to in science fiction strikes me as a slightly more complicated question. Within the science fiction community there’s been a bit of an ongoing debate about whether there’s too much depressing, dystopic science fiction, with some writers like Neal Stephenson arguing that kind of work betrays science fiction’s responsibility to dream big, and create the imaginative framework for the sorts of projects that will transform our future. To my mind there’s a fair bit of nostalgia tied up in that argument: whether science fiction really helped make the moon shots happen is debatable, but even if it did that kind of big engineering was mostly driven by the Cold War, rather than engineers reading Arthur C Clarke . Likewise it’s a view that harks back to a time when science fiction saw itself as having a mission or a program, and where the community that was producing it was cohesive enough to cleave to that mission. But in a way this debate also misses the way science fiction at the moment is leaking out into the mainstream. That’s partly about a shift in the culture of publishing and reading, and changes in the way we consume and discuss books, and indeed about a generation of writers like myself who have grown up seeing the fantastic as simply one form of expression rather than something to be embarrassed about. But I suspect it’s also because our world feels increasingly science fictional, and science fiction – and indeed all the literatures of the fantastic – offers a toolkit that allows writers to get at the weirdness and immensity of what’s taking place all around us. That’s especially true when you look at climate change: if Ghosh is right and one of the problems with realist fiction is its inability to make sense of the exceptional then the toolkit of science fiction, a form whose core business is transformative change should be tailor made for exploring these questions, whether by giving us ways to represent the uncanniness and dislocation of a climate-altered world or by providing tools with which to talk about time and deep time. Indeed I’d go so far as to say one of the reasons so much fiction about climate change is science fictional has less to do with a desire to represent the future as a recognition of the effectiveness of the tropes and strategies of science fiction at making sense of the perturbations and weirdness of climate change . “Whether science fiction really helped make the moon shots happen is debatable” To go back to that idea of optimism, I suspect one of the reasons this kind of work doesn’t seem optimistic within the sort of big engineering framework that people like Stephenson advocate is that it resists the idea that climate change is simply a problem we can engineer away, or that technology can fix it. Obviously technology will have to be a big part of fixing it, but as Aurora reminds us, those assumptions about our capacity to out-engineer nature are part of the problem. Or, as one of the characters in New York 2140 puts it, “Mother Nature always bats last”. What Aurora offers is a way to see both things at work at once: an optimism about the future and technology, and an awareness of the cost of failing to recognise the degree to which we are expressions of our environment, and temporary expressions at that. Coupled with his insistence our current economic and social conditions are neither natural nor the end of history makes for a very potent mix."

"Science fiction has been at the forefront of long-term thinking in Western culture for at least a century. It goes back to the likes of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Before that, dystopian or utopian novels were typically set in a distant place, like the island in More’s U topia , not a distant tomorrow. H.G. Wells blew that away in The Time Machine by setting his story thousands of years in the future. And then came Olaf Stapledon with books like Last and First Men , which tells the history of humankind over a two billion year timespan. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series also extended our time horizons thousands of years into the future. And for me one of the most important writers in this tradition is Kim Stanley Robinson. I consider him the greatest contemporary long-term thinker in SF. He is grappling with the kinds of topics I’m trying to grapple with in my book, such as how do we think long-term about biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence and so on? Over the last couple of years I’ve read more books by Kim Stanley Robinson than by any other writer. At first sight it’s a classic generation starship story, but it is actually the best exploration of ecological economics and its importance that I’ve ever read. You have a giant spacecraft travelling for 200 years with 2000 people on board to colonise a distant planet. The spacecraft has 24 biomes in it—so there’s a desert, a savannah, a wet tropical zone and so on—and the people are living and dying for several generations, trying to survive in a closed system. They’re trying not to use more resources than they can produce and regenerate on their farms and spaceship, and not to create more waste than they can deal with. In other words, it’s about trying to keep the system in balance. That is the essence of ecological economics as expressed by people like Herman Daly in the 1970s. Aurora looks like it’s a book about space, but it’s really a depiction of the dilemmas we face on Earth—about how to survive on the only planet we know that can sustain human life. I’m sorry to give a spoiler, but this is exactly what the people on the spaceship realise: upon reaching their destination, they realise that humankind cannot survive in a place it has not evolved to adapt to, and so they decide to come back to Earth. “Science fiction has been at the forefront of long-term thinking in Western culture for at least a century” And that’s the trick of Kim Stanley Robinson. What looks like SF is in fact contemporary political analysis. He is telling us that if we want to survive and thrive for the long term as a species, we need to live within the carrying capacity of the planet. We need to follow the rules of ecological economics, and not be obsessed with unending GDP growth . Reading the book made me think about mountain climbing. If you want to climb Everest and stay alive the first and most important thing is to make sure your base camp is in good order and can continue to support you if things go wrong. People like Elon Musk say, ‘let’s go to Mars!’. But actually, before we go to Mars, let’s work out how to look after our base camp—planet Earth. Once we’ve learned how to do that, go on all the trips to Mars that you like."