Science fiction fans tend to be partisans of particular sub-genres. Robinson tends to be grouped with the "hard scifi" folks, but his attention to good science in his latest work aids the literary excellence.
I've had my problems with Robinson in the past. I know I'm not the only one who can recognize that "2312" is brilliant and unreadable. Robinson has always been willing to take readers through mind-numbing, plot-free detail for a questionable payoff in the end. In many ways, he reminds me of Neal Stephenson---smart, complex, and sometimes not worth the effort. I loved the "Baroque Cycle" and yet could not finish it.
Aurora, though, was a much easier read. There was work, and there was payoff, and the book is about much more than many reviewers have noted.
The book follows a "generation ship" fuk of putative planetary colonists. Generation ships have been a feature of scifi for decades. As a plot device they allow authors to accept that the speed of light is an inviolable thing. There is no mysterious FTL drive, no worm holes, no warp speed. Generation ships help place a story firmly in one of our possible futures.
The story opens with broken prose introducing us to a journey about a century and a half gone. The ship's chief engineer, Devi, is a brilliant, depressed ball of anxiety, cursed with the knowledge that the original mission is likely to fail in one of a thousand different ways. She shares these anxieties to a certain extent with her husband Badim, but really befriends the ship itself. She spends much of her free time teaching the ship's computer to think.
"ship", the name the interstellar generation ship's AI chooses for itself, is a brilliantly rendered character. It begins as a horrible narrator, and, like Robinson himself, tends to overwhelm the reader with detail, not wanting to sacrifice accuracy for the thread of story that runs through events. The AI, with help from Devi, learns to work through the "halting problem", escaping from endless loops of cause and effect in order to make an actual decision. This maturation is wonderfully rendered in the prose as ship's writing becomes more clear, more linear, and more human.
Robinson likes to play with the reader. We are frequently led to question the point of view of the narrator: is it ship? Is it Devi's daughter Freya? Is it an omniscient narrator?
This is made more complicated when in the story, ship cannot possibly be the narrator (I'll avoid spoilers here).
So, on one level, this book is really a coming-of-age story. "ship" is the central character in this, but so are it's passengers, who once dreamed of colonizing new worlds, only to conclude that not only is it difficult, but likely impossible. "What were they thinking" is a common refrain of the ancestors descendants of the original colonists.
This is contrasted with the residents of the Solar System, who still reach for the greener grass across light-years, unwilling or unable to learn from their ancestors' failures.
Robinson's complex characters are drawn in short strokes, leaving the reader to fill in the details, but the mood is clearly set, and the personalities are immediately familiar. In many ways this is an existentialist work, with characters' fulfillment coming through decisions and actions. In fact, "ship" only becomes truly sentient when it makes a decision and acts.
Unlike some of his works, Robinson's Aurora is brief enough to give a good account for hard SciFi and to serve as a compelling narrative. Of all his works, this is the one most likely to be read in the classrooms of the future.