Aurora

By Kim Stanley Robinson,

Book cover of Aurora

Book description

'What a saga! Scifi with honest, complex humanity, physics, biology, sociology' - Tom Hanks

'Aurora is a magnificent piece of writing, certainly Robinson's best novel since his mighty Mars trilogy, perhaps his best ever' - Guardian

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our destination.

A new…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Aurora as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Quite possibly one of the most divisive SF novels of recent years, this starts with a familiar scenario: the launch of a generation ship to transport thousands of colonists – and, ultimately, their descendants – to a distant habitable world. Despite having written Red Mars, one of the best novels about colonizing another world, Robinson has disparaged the idea that any such thing is, in fact, possible or even desirable. In Aurora, he confronts the question of what happens when those descendants, born on a ship they didn’t choose to be passengers on, decide they have a quite different…

Robinson, a science fiction master, has no qualms promoting views that are science fiction heresies. After publishing his acclaimed trilogy about the terraforming of Mars, in Aurora, Robinson argues that the astrofuture premise of science fiction dating back to its earliest days is wrong. The grand goal of evolving beyond the planet is doomed to fail. In Aurora, a generational starship arrives at its target exoplanet, but what seems a promising terraforming mission is stymied. As Robinson said to me in an email exchange, “The new paradigm might be that life is a planetary expression, and away from…

From Fred's list on botched space colonization efforts.

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

Book cover of A Diary in the Age of Water

Nina Munteanu Author Of Darwin's Paradox

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Writer Ecologist Mother Teacher Explorer

Nina's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.

Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

What is this book about?

Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…


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