“New novels out this summer from Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora) and Neal Stephenson (Seveneves) dismantle the fantastic Star Trek vision of space travel in favor of a portrayal of space exploration with more vertigo, more friction, more weight, and more gravity.”
“For someone raised (as I was) on dreams of spaceflight, these novels are simultaneously exhilarating and completely horrifying. The fact is that we just shouldn’t live in space, but we want to anyway — these novels envision the start, the wonderful and terrible start, of what it would take to even begin to manage living up there permanently.”
“Robinson is very at home in space, with many of his best-loved novels revolving around a more-utopian or less-utopian future for humanity in the larger solar system (the Mars trilogy, 2312, Galileo’s Dream, the early novels Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness — even his wonderful alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt ends on the image of a space launch). In fact, many of Robinson’s stories seem to be alternate-universe versions of each other, with the same future-historical events occurring in different order or in different ways, or with better or worse results.”
“These are both, I should say, genuinely great reads, especially as the initial premises described above give way (via those undiscussable twists) to fascinating new decision-points without clear or easy resolutions. I think Aurora may well be Robinson’s best novel (and I’ve heard other fans of his say the same thing), and Seveneves is certainly in the same ballpark as Anathem, Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash (my favorites of Stephenson’s books). They’re both terrific.”