Far-out sci-fi: Stephenson’s Seveneves and Robinson’s Aurora

Seveneves and Aurora both envisage futuristic space travel but reach rather different conclusions.

The possibility of living in outer space has long fascinated science-fiction writers.

In the 1960s and 70s there was little doubt that space was the final frontier, or that the visions science fiction offered of space travel and colonies on other worlds were images of a future that was not just possible but inevitable.

But in the 40 years since, this assumption has begun to seem more and more problematic. Once we had reached the moon and the space race was won, the fantastic expense and danger of space travel became more and more difficult to justify, especially given that the more we learned about conditions on neighbouring planets the more fantastically hostile they appeared.

For a culture that had invested so many of its ideas about the future in the possibility of space travel, this was a confronting reality to come to grips with, not least because it coincided with the end of the Cold War. If the future doesn’t lie overhead, where does it lie? What does it look like? And — perhaps more deeply — what is our collective project?

These are questions that haunt both Seveneves and Aurora, the new novels by celebrated American science-fiction authors Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Both books revisit the idea of life in space. In Seveneves life in space is not a choice but an imperative, forced on the human race after an unidentified high-energy particle strikes the moon and destroys it.

Initially, nobody is clear what the moon’s destruction will mean. Although it has fractured into “seven large pieces, as well as innumerable smaller ones”, gravity prevents the shifting mass of fragments from breaking up.

But a few scientists quickly realise this state of equilibrium is only temporary and when the fragments destabilise the mass will break up and the moon’s remains rain down on Earth in a meteorite bombardment so intense it will boil the oceans and ignite the atmosphere, rendering the planet’s surface uninhabitable for up to 10,000 years.

Faced with certain destruction the governments of the world seize on one faint sliver of hope: a plan to build a space station capable of preserving a handful of human beings. And so, with only two years until the bombardment begins, they embark on a frantic attempt to launch into space as many people and as many materials as possible.

Stephenson’s novels have long been distinguished by their encyclopedic command of multiple disciplines and their wrist-cracking length, and Seveneves is no exception. After the successive shocks of the opening chapters the relevance of the earthbound characters and narratives begins to fade, replaced by a focus on the desperate race to build the orbital life raft.

Seveneves doesn’t stint on the technical detail of this process, bombarding the reader with long discussions of orbital mechanics and delta-V. In theory these discussions should be forbidding to readers without a solid grasp of physics and engineering, but in Stephenson’s hands they are not just comprehensible but exciting, particularly in the latter stages of the process.

Yet the focus on questions of engineering and physics in Seveneves is also more than just Stephenson revealing his inner geek. Woven through the novel is a much larger argument about the capacity of science and engineering to realise human potential and, commensurately, about the need to accept big risks as the price of realising big dreams.

This sort of faith in technology isn’t new to science fiction, and neither is the impatience with human fallibility that goes hand in hand with it.

Certainly it comes as little surprise that when the rescue plan comes unstuck it is not the scientists or the astronauts who are behind the problems but the civilian politicians and passengers. But neither is it easy to escape the suspicion that what Stephenson is really expressing is a nostalgia for a kind of collective effort that was peculiar to the Cold War, or that there is something slightly utopian about his belief that, left to their own devices, scientists and engineers would build a better world.

In this regard Robinson’s stunning novel Aurora provides a fascinating counterpoint to Seveneves.

Set more than 500 years in the future, it focuses on Freya, one of the 2122 colonists aboard a starship launched toward the star Tau Ceti. As the novel opens, the ship, which has been the only home any of its inhabitants has known for more than 150 years, is approaching its destination, a moment that will be the culmination of five generations of communal effort aimed at keeping their tiny environment alive and safe in the immensity and hostility of interstellar space.

Although Aurora shares many of the interests of Robinson’s most famous work, the remarkable future-history trilogy RedMars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (books it evokes on more than one occasion), it is probably best understood as a companion volume of sorts to Robinson’s last novel but one, 2312.

Where 2312 depicted a future in which ­humanity has spread, largely peacefully, through the solar system, colonising the inner planets, the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, reshaping environments, cultures and even human bodies to adapt to these new worlds, Aurora is engaged with what would usually be regarded as the next stage of that process: starflight.

The idea that humanity’s destiny lies in the stars has long been one of the guiding assumptions of science fiction, but in recent years it has come under increasing scrutiny, with growing numbers of writers producing novels that inhabit futures constrained by both the speed of light and the sheer immensity of interstellar ­distances.

With its refusal to countenance travel faster than the speed of light or magical hand-waving about alien technology or wormholes, Aurora can be read as an exercise in the same sort of scientifically rigorous science fiction.

Yet, as becomes clear when the colonists arrive and discover the worlds that they and their parents and grandparents dedicated their lives to reaching are not what they were promised, it also goes much further, demanding we re-examine the not just plausibility of our fantasies about interstellar exploration but also the ethical implications of those fantasies.

As Freya declares despairingly when an Earthbound academic lectures her about her squeamishness in the face of the human cost of interstellar travel, “It isn’t just foolish, it’s sick … Ninety-nine per cent sent out to die, as part of the plan? Die a miserable death they can’t prevent, children and animals and ship and all, and all for a stupid idea someone has, a dream? Why? Why have that dream? Why are they that way?”

Yet in a way what is most remarkable about Aurora is not its systematic dismantling of so many of the core assumptions of the genre it inhabits, but the fact that despite its scepticism it is nonetheless a celebration of the possibilities of that genre and, more deeply, of the fruits of human endeavour.

For embedded this brilliant, profound and deeply humane novel’s exploration of the limits of technological possibility is a vision not just of building a better world, but of the interconnectedness of organisms and environments, and the wonder and transience of life itself.

James Bradley’s new novel is Clade.

Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hachette, 496pp, $29.99

Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

HarperCollins, 880pp, $32.99