Aurora is the story of a ship sent to colonize habitable moons around a relatively nearby star, and the problems that arise. There's no faster-than-light travel (they don't get past 10% the speed of light), so the trip takes 150 years. The people selected to go aren't put into any sort of hibernation or stasis, so it isn't them that will actually make planetfall, but their several generations removed descendants. Which becomes a point of contention. The originators of all this had big plans, but it falls to all these other people, their descendants to make them happen, or die. And the descendants never got a choice in the matter.
Based solely on this story, I'm guessing Robinson doesn't think much of the idea of colonizing other worlds as a solution to problems here on Earth (I'd say she's right.) This mission isn't presented as that, so much as humanity thinking making a mark in the universe is a good idea, but even the worlds the inhabit within the Solar System are presented as being milennia away from being anything like truly habitable worlds. Mars, for example, is described as being perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years away from being sufficiently terraformed humans could live outside without resupply from Earth.
And until they reach that new home, their ship-home is a comparatively tiny, closed system. All they have in terms of nutrients, minerals, materials, genetic diversity (of both humans and all the flora and fauna coming with them) are confined within that ship. That leads to problems, not all of which (or probably even most of which) the people who came up with this idea considered. So there's quite a bit in there about nutrient cycles, conservation of nutrients, issues of population biology stemming from the inhabitants of the ship essentially being an island population now.
(Quammon's Song of the Dodo did have a part about how species that are used to having low populations are less vulnerable to the sorts of genetic issues that crop up from a limited amount of genetic diversity than species accustomed to having a large genetic base that is suddenly sharply restricted.)
Even once they reach their destination, the problems don't end, and social strife becomes a new concern in the face of these new problems, as the community on the ship can't agree on what to do. Ultimately, they agree to disagree, and the story proceeds from there.
All of that, the problems, the solutions, the things that apparently nobody paid attention to, or underestimated the importance of, the stresses it puts on the people and the ship, that was all pretty interesting. The idea that every deceased is cremated and, other than just a tiny bit of the remains their family gets to keep, reintroduced into the soil as a source of phosphorous and other important minerals. The fact the bacteria evolve more quickly than everything else, and get into places nobody planned on. The limits of what the ship can handle.
Robinson presents most of the story as a narrative being compiled by the ship's artificial intelligence, who was told to do so by one of the most innovative engineers on the ship when, and has to figure out how to do that as it goes along. So Robinson tries to vary the writing style as the AI grows, and evolves, investigates new concepts in writing and logic systems. Concludes metaphors and dumb, for example, and that analogies are much better, if still imprecise. Which sometimes segues into ruminations on how all human language is about inaccurate comparisons of one thing to something else. By near the end, the ship has a tendency to vastly over-explain everything, in a way that reminds me a bit of my dad. Where he enjoys talking about it so much he can't (or doesn't want) to get to the point.
The one drawback to this is that, by that point, I identified the ship as the main character more than Devi or Freya, Devi's daughter. So I was more concerned with the ship's fate than theirs. The last chapter of the book is focused on a group of the sip's inhabitants (including Freya) trying to adapt to what's a wholly new circumstance for them, and it kinda didn't work for me. I think I get what Robinson was going for with the last 20 pages, where Freya confronts her fears and goes outside, but I kept reading it, expecting something a little more, profound? Final, maybe.
'Devi scowled, but it was her mock scowl; she was admitting Freya was right, even though she didn't want to; that was what that look always said. She said, "Our ancestors were idiots."
Freya said, "But how does that make us different from anyone else?"
Devi laughed and gave Freya a shove, then hugged her as they walked along. "Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you're saying?"
"That's what it seems like."
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