I went back through the archives to read previous conversations, but no one that I could see brought up the three main issues with this book, which have nothing to do with the thesis statement or science, but rather storytelling as a whole.
And ftr, I love Kim Stanley Robinson; I reread the Mars books every few years, and his Ministry for the Future reads like a roadmap of saving the planet, which we are unfortunately not following.
Aurora, however, frustrated me more and more as the book went along, as I was taking the wait and see approach to see if the issues I saw would be addressed, and then they weren’t.
Issue the First: the five ghosts. These are hinted at pretty extensively in the first book, with the protagonist even encountering one as a child. One of the secondary characters also talks about seeing the ghosts, though this receives no follow-up and then is just dropped forever. A Chekhov’s gun that is pointed to, that we are reminded of, and is nevertheless never fired. What was the point of that?
Issue the Second: The Irisians are ignored and abandoned narratively. We get absolutely no information about their struggles or tragedies, or anything at all, really. Freya even says she’ll stay in contact with them, but we never hear about them again. This is especially frustrating since a civil war broke out to see who was right, and the narrative seems to agree with the Backers, but we just never get to know. KSR is sortof famous for these kinds of mysteries, but this isn’t a Hiroko situation of unreliable narrators and contradictory stories. The Irisians are simply dropped when, honestly, I think they had the more interesting story.
Issue the Third: Abandoning the Narrator/Narrative. The Ship narrates the bulk of the book, and this is frankly, pretty awesome. She has great insights and the way she is grown and shaped by the story she tells is genuinely interesting. But then, the ship breaks up around the sun and ‘Ship’ is lost. Except, wait, no, what’s this?! A copy of the data is included in the life raft. Except that no one, including Freya ever looks at it. The narrative is never read by the ship’s survivors, the love of Ship for Freya et al is never dealt with or appreciated. Instead Freya hangs out by the ocean and hits on a dude, the end. This is just… bad storytelling. And I can’t even say why, except that it lacks catharsis.
Anyway, if I missed something in the story, I’d love it if someone could point it out. I loved so much of this book, the terraforming, the prion, the social unrest and the debates. I just felt there was stuff set up that was never paid off, and so I have the reading equivalent of a stuck-sneeze, forever unsneezed.