Guaranteed: Many Spoilers
This month, I read two hard science fiction novels on similar themes back to back, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. Hard science fiction is more or less defined by whether the author cares about, and is able to describe, the deceleration of a spacecraft. Ships in Star Trek and thousands of other movies and stories, can go anywhere, turn and stop on a dime. Both these novels have extended scenes in which slowing down to match someone else’s orbit becomes a matter of life or death.
Stephenson’s novel involves a fall of civilization when the moon explodes and earth is bombarded by fragments, with just enough lag time to allow the launch of a space fleet. Robinson’s is a little more mainstream plot, one more generation ship headed to nearby space in a well worn genre going back to the 1960’s at least. I remember a Brian Aldiss version in which (a common variation) the protagonists did not know they were on a ship (also the plot of a not bad space horror flick, Pandorum). Nonetheless, Robinson’s is the better novel.
I adored Stephenson’s early efforts, Snow Crash and Diamond Age, but read later works like Cryptonomicon and Reamde without retaining very much; Stephenson now is among those writers whose technical mastery I recognize without becoming attached (I can pick up a Lee Child novel and not be sure if I read it or not after skimming the first ten pages). Robinson similarly is not a writer you read over and over; he is whip-smart, inventive, didactic and excessively prosy. Still, moments in Three Californias and the Mars trilogy have stayed with me (in the former novel, his prediction of the Citibike sharing system in NYC was a pile of bicycles--you took one, rode it wherever you needed, and left it in another pile). Aurora may be his best novel; Robinson has leveraged his own tendency to robotic prose by making the narrator of most of the novel an AI, the generation ship’s quantum computer. This is rather delightfully executed; across the decades, the AI, which calls itself merely Ship, becomes quirkier, more human, for example using lots of alliteration in later chapters. By the end, Ship is the tragic hero of the novel, decelerating enough to offload its humans towards earth via a shuttle, then burning up in an effort to use the Sun as a brake. Ship’s last few minutes, after almost two hundred years caring for humans, are spent thinking about love: “We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate....[T]he consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by a kind of polarization...The feeling of attentiveness itself is an immediate rewardâ€.
The other unique element in the novel is that interstellar travel fails: when people arrive at Aurora, they find a “fast prion†that kills colonists in days, and (after a brief, bloody civil war) two factions of humans part company, one staying in the foreign solar system (and later falling silent), while the other group takes a piece of the ship and returns to Earth. In this world of Robinson’s, not only can humans not hang on anywhere else in space, but the population of the ship becomes shorter, stupider and sicker across the decades, and the food runs out. It is a poignant human world in the jaws of the Second Law, recognizable, not just a science fiction novel but a capital-N Novel.
Stephenson’s similar effort did not reach me the same way; Stephenson is good at cosmic comedy, as in Snow Crash, less competent at tragedy. He seems to get diverted more easily with set pieces and details, for example how the numerous small ships and stations which make up the remainder of humanity “swarm†without colliding, like a school of fish. He has a satisfying broad canvas, with obsessive scientists, ambitious politicians, a tough and single-minded Russian woman astronaut, and an annoying blogger who is killed and eaten when food runs out. In a memorable seminar I took, playwright Craig Lucas said, “Get your characters up a tree, throw stones at them, get them down againâ€. Both Stephenson and Robinson want to tell you what the leaves look like, how they break down sunlight, how moisture is distributed, how the tree next door differs, also the physics of flying stones. Aurora has more narrative drive. Seveneves has an enjoyable transition five thousand years into the future, when the human race, still living in space, now consists of seven races descended from the seven fertile women who were (with one infertile one) the sole survivors at the end of the prior section. However, in the last chapters, Stephenson is too concerned with future cities and vehicles designed like chains or clocks, too little with human nature and its variations.
Both novels share one other thing: in each, the human race, in crisis and panic, too easily resorts to violence. No matter how advanced our technology and society becomes, it seems we will always revert to crushing each other’s skulls, both authors report.