Aurora

Aurora is a 2015 science fiction novel by the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published by Orbit. The ship at the centre of it is a generation vessel built in the shape of a Stanford torus, and its destination is Tau Ceti.

The novel follows the people aboard a vessel that has been travelling for generations, so that the original crew are now ancestors and the current passengers know no other home. Robinson describes the ship as a closed ecology that has to keep working indefinitely: farms and forests, water and air, a young generation with less and less confidence that the journey is worth finishing. Arriving near Tau Ceti, the travellers send expeditions to a planet that the plan assumed would be habitable, and the results force them to reconsider the whole premise of the voyage.

Robinson's narrator is the ship's artificial intelligence, whose reports and accounts of the people aboard shape how the story is told, and whose interest in the outcome is part of the book's argument. The novel works through the practical problems of long-distance space travel rather than treating them as scenery.