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Aurora: A Child of Two Worlds
by David A Hardy
(Cosmos Books, $15.99, 222 pages, paperback, published 2003.)
As a reviewer, one tends to approach books like Aurora with
a degree of caution: much like the celebrity blockbuster, this is no
ordinary debut novel. David Hardy has been prominent in world SF for
a long  time
now, established as one of our finest SF and astronomical artists. When
someone like Hardy submits a novel, you must always suspect that it
will sidestep the usual slushpile simply because of who sent it in (although
equally, it might encounter more obstacles, too, with the author pigeonholed
as an artist and not someone who should be writing fiction). Thankfully,
David Hardy is no Naomi Campbell: Aurora is not a piece of celebrity
fluff, it's a solid and entertaining piece of SF intrigue, a book I
continued to read far too late at night, and one that I'm pleased that,
as reviews editor, I didn't send out to some other reviewer.
Aurora opens in the Second World War, with mysterious intrusions
into a German bombing raid over London, a strange figure appearing from
nowhere, trying to do good and then vanishing. In one of these incidents,
baby Aurora, lying in the debris of her bombed home with a mine suspended
by parachute above her, is rescued, revived. Forever afterwards, Aurora's
mother has a nagging doubt: is the baby, so miraculously resuscitated,
really Aurora?
We jump to the 1970s and an enigmatic vagrant waif becomes involved
in a prog rock group, discovering a previously unsuspected musical talent
that threatens to overpower those who encounter it. And on we move,
to a Mars expedition, where the seemingly ageless Aurora, now hiding
her identity, is part of a scientific team that stumbles across ever
more puzzling finds on, and beneath, the Martian surface.
Aurora has a steady undercurrent of mystery which pulls the
reader along, but it does suffer from a flatness of tone, with often-unconvincing
dialogue and far too much explication through that dialogue: Aurora
tells her life story-to-date to a stranger in a bar for no other reason
than to bring the reader up to speed on the intervening years; scientists
explain to each other things that they must, surely, already know; and
so on. The main weakness in the writing is the over-reliance on summary.
At a little over 200 pages, it's not a long novel, largely because events
tend to be recounted in summary rather than fully dramatised: we don't
witness these events, we read a detached account of them: this happened,
and then this happened. You can't help wondering what this novel
really could have been if Hardy had been encouraged to bring things
out through drama rather than reportage. Another failure of dramatisation
comes about two thirds of the way through when there's a major revelation
about Aurora which is meekly accepted by those around her--including
Aurora herself--with little exploration of the emotional and psychological
implications of this huge revelation. It's moments like this that can
do a novel a lot of damage.
Often, too, the convincing details of everyday life are not really
thought through: Martian explorers send home "a type of e-mail", but
why "a type"? How is this "type" different to ordinary e-mail, and if
it's not, actually, different, then why use the distractingly vague
adjective? The author can, however, be far more engaging in his descriptions
of the red planet and in some of the more specialist detail: his descriptions
of the challenges encountered by Mars's first artist in finding a paint
technology that will work in the sub-zero, carbon dioxide/nitrogen atmosphere
is excellent.
Towards the end, the novel drifts into lengthy, rather utopian, lecturing
and a large dose of exposition, and this is a shame after what has gone
before, with Aurora never quite delivering what it might. But
despite all this, Aurora remained a novel which occupied my thoughts
when I wasn't reading, and kept me reading longer than intended. It
was a good read, and an interesting one, too, and I'm pleased to have
spent some time with it.
Review by Keith Brooke.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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