Teaser Tuesday: “Aurora”

So this week, I was reading Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson, AKA Humans: No Matter Where They Go, There They Are.

The basic premise of Aurora is that humans are, for reasons that have not yet been clarified in the book*, attempting to colonize a moon orbiting a planet around Tau Ceti, which, if you bother to click on that link and read the Wikipedia article, really is quite sun-like and has attracted a lot of attention from folks here on Earth who are interested in finding evidence of extraterrestrial life. Everything else in the book has been scientifically accurate as well. Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t play around.

The spaceship in question, which has an AI (more or less) and just refers to itself as “Ship”**, is basically an Ark in Space with various earthly biomes scattered in segments along its rings, each with a miniature landscape based on the earth analog of its biome; so there are miniature mountains, miniature lakes, miniature forests, miniature croplands, etc. There’s also wildlife such as deer and seagulls and livestock such as cows and pigs (hence the “Pigs in Space” thing). The only problem is, after close to 200 years traveling through space in basically a self-contained island, recycling every single chemical and nutrient, the systems have started breaking down, as systems do. Hence we have this conversation between the ship’s main engineer and her daughter, who is the main character (more or less):

“So, here we are in this thing.”
“And it has to work.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t burden you with this stuff. I don’t want you to be scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Good. But you should be.”

I don’t want you to be scared, but you should be is an interesting parenting technique. I’m not sure how successful it’s likely to be.

Now, I know that it used to be a tradition for me with Teaser Tuesday to include a teaser from the book I was currently working on, but since I’m still on pause with the working on books**, I obviously can’t do that. But I can still pick a teaser from one of my finished books. It’s my blog, I can do whatever I want! So, after consulting the Gods of Randomness, here’s a little snippet from the middle of Shards (part one of the “Strings” duology***):

“Home.”  She looked away from him, across the river, at the smoldering husk of the forest.  “What’s so great about home?  What does it even mean?”

“Home means home.  Where we came from.  Land of snow and ice and study hall.  You can use the Illata to open doors?  Just open one that puts us back in your bedroom.  Bring the Illata along if you don’t want the Rittandic to get it.  Let’s just not be here anymore.”

* “Because it’s there” seems likely.
** I’m considering giving it another try next year. We’ll see.
*** Which was supposed to be one book, but at around 1,000 pages it was going to cost a fortune to print and there was no way I could expect people to pay like $35 for a paperback from a nobody like me, so I split it in half. Hey, Tolkein was forced to split his into thirds, so two was a bargain!