Aurora

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson touches on a number of sci-fi issues.  Mostly, it is an invective against the colonization of other stars.  It starts with a multi-generational starship traveling 1/10 the speed of light using nuclear fuel.  Realistically, according to hard-sci-fi nuts this is about as fast as a spaceship can go.  A shield a mile in diameter to protect the ship from collisions is replaced with an electronic shield.  There are about a dozen zones each in the two sectors, A and B.  The zones are connected by spokes, and the sectors are connected by a spine, if you can picture that.

The protagonist of the novel is Freya, the daughter of Devi.  Freya begins the novel as a child, while Devi is the de facto leader of the expedition, the best friend of the ship's A.I., and the chief engineer.  The ship eventually arrives at Tau Ceti, a star with a moon - Aurora - in the "habitable zone," which turns out to be quite inhospitable for various reasons.  The inhabitability of Aurora causes one character to suggest that all star travel is futile.

I hadn't read Kim Stanley Robinson for 10 or 15 years, since I read his "Mars" Trilogy, along with the companion book, The Martians.  I'm driving a lot and listening to a lot of sci-fi; I guess that the 17-hour audiobook took me nine days to listen to.  With my upcoming job at Lyft starting soon, I'll probably be listening to even more audiobooks.  I started Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, a short novel published in 1914 in Japan.  That book might take me a little bit into next week, when I plan on getting back into sci-fi.