Aurora, the new science fiction novel of Kim Stanley Robinson, is a totally awesome masterpiece that will keep you glued to the book until you finish reading. Yet, Robinson's grim views on the possibility of interstellar colonization seem overly pessimistic.

In the 2012 Nebula Award Winner 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson portrays a future solar system teeming with human life on the planets, terraformed asteroids and space habitats. In Aurora, Robinson goes to the stars. The story starts in a large multi-generation starship with more than two thousand colonists en route to Tau Ceti at one tenth of the speed of light, then moves to Aurora, an Earth-like moon in the Tau Ceti system.

Aurora is a fascinating story of interstellar colonization, with touching stories of real people in a centuries-long space adventure, dazzling portraits of interstellar propulsion and orbital dynamics, and a quantum computer slowly waking up to sentience. The only alien life form is a nasty micro-organism.

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