Science Fiction / Space Opera: Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinson
ISBN: 9780316098106
Read April 29, 2016

Ugh.  So many mixed feelings.

This one's going to be bullet points, because I'm not coherent enough to offer a spoiler-free review.

• The title and blurbs are all misleading; this tale is actually a (long-winded and pompous) polemic against space travel. The author has an axe to grind, and grind it he does, with tortured metaphors and similes (literally) and scenarios designed to belabor the point. The misdirection and the subsequent lecture vexes. Enormously.
• Despite that, I did enjoy the story (and the three, maybe five if we're being generous, whole characters we get to follow around), but it was not original at all. Chapters and sections and concepts and musings were all lifted wholesale from everywhere: Asimov, Heinlein, Pern, his own old Mars stuff, David Brin's stuff, up to modern movies: I caught bits of 2001, and of Moon, and whole scads of The Martian and whiffs of Interstellar and I'm sure there are more I missed - both books and movies. Anyone even slightly invested in the genre should catch them - they aren't subtle. I got the feeling at those times that he was the authorial equivalent of the student who isn't technically plagiarizing, because he's writing his own content. But he read the wiki article and skimmed the original studies and he isn't actually contributing anything more than a slightly self-important regurgitation of the previously-skimmed material. That also vexes.
• I'm as much on for hard science as anyone, and the sections in The Martian (book and film) where he sciences the shit out of things are enormously satisfying. Likewise I like a good Asimovian philosophical/sociological muse every now and again. The sections here would have been also, if they had not been quiiiiite so long, nor quite so tortured in the specific interests of point-belaboring.  
• World-building. We are roughly 800 years into the future, have permanent settlements of multi-billionaires on Saturn's moons that can fund an interstellar ark for shits and giggles, sea-levels have risen 30some feet, there are the beach-building equivalent of "rewilders" out there as a niche lifestyle (all of which I have serious questions about the implications thereof), but we're still using spray cans of aerosol sunscreen that only last one hour. Seriously? Vexation.
• Dropped plot-points and Checkov's guns lying about like crazy. What do ancient historical genocidal feuding, ship explosions, "secret" passageways through maintenance systems, civil unrest, purposefully-flawed printing instructions, and imperiled colonies all have in common?  Who knows!  Me neither, even after finishing the freaking book!  VEXED.