Oh I wanted to love this book. I did love this book, or at least the first half. But I fear Robinson ran out of plot for the second half, after the big crisis, and it finished pretty weakly. Still enjoyed it and would gladly read a sequel or even better, a second book from the perspective of other characters involved in the big crisis.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The good thing about the book is the generation ship story, a well worn sci-fi trope. (One of the first books I ever loved was Ben Bova's End of Exiles). I really like Robinson's spin on it, the pessimistic story, the idea that maybe our future is just going to go to shit. It's depressing reading but I think also very timely and relevant to where American culture is right now. I also liked it specifically as a counterpoint to his Utopianism in the Mars Trilogy. The first half of the book all the way to the Big Decision was just great, loved it.

But then the Big Decision sort of takes all the humans out of the story. Robinson ends up having to invent a surprise cryogenic technology to even move the people where they need to go, and we get 50+ pages of narrative with effectively only the narrator as a character. And then the plot reaches its natural conclusion and just kind of peters out, whispers to a conclusion. The final 20 pages were particularly self-indulgent and while stylistically I get what he was aiming for, I don't think it worked.

Speaking of style, Robinson also seems to be playing with narrative styles in his recent writing. I like the odd narrative voice in Shaman. I did not like the narrative style in Aurora though, the artifice that the book is written by the AI that runs the spaceship. There's a particularly clumsy section early on where the ship is being taught how to write and it's like 15 pages of awkward experimental prose that I could have done without. Overall it just fell a bit flat.

Complaints aside, there's a bunch of good stuff in the book, and I did like it.