AURORA: BORING TITLE; THRILLING NOVEL
In my last post I reviewed Cold Storage, David Koepp’s campy thriller about exploding green zombies (I loved it). I mentioned in that post that I had already ordered Koepp’s second and (so far) only other novel, Aurora, published in 2022. I’ve decided to go ahead and write this review now, even though I just finished the novel five minutes ago.
Aurora is another techno-thriller. In Cold Storage, the threat to life on earth was a deadly alien fungus brought to earth by the 1979 crash of the Skylab space station in Western Australia. In Aurora, the threat to life on earth is a Coronal Mass Ejection (or CME), a real-life phenomenon that occurs when the sun spews out a massive burst of magnetic wind (essentially a solar fart). Sounds terrifying, but it happens on average three times a day. These are similar to, and often accompany, solar flares, which are also commonplace. Most of these bursts flare out harmlessly into empty space. Occasionally a CME will, by chance, impact the earth’s magnetosphere and cause temporary damage to the earth’s magnetic field and can disrupt the earth’s electric power grids. Only a few times in human history has a really large CME struck the earth’s magnetosphere. Before the advent of electricity, these events were not nearly as disruptive as they have since become. The biggest recorded CME, known as the Carrington Event, occurred on September first, 1859. At that time, telegraphs were about the only electrical devices in operation. The Carrington Event sparked fires at various telegraph stations but did no other major damage. CME’s also cause auroral displays all across the earth’s skies, displays that are similar to the Northern Lights, but which can last for hours or days. These are called black-sky events, because they can darken the skies for long periods of time, a darkness broken only by the kind of wispy greenish light usually associated with aurora borealis. If a CME as powerful as the Carrington Event were to hit the earth’s magnetosphere today, it could bring down just about every electrical power plant on the planet. What’s more it would put so much electricity into the atmosphere that just stepping into the ocean could cause you to be electrocuted.
Aurora, is a page-turning thriller about a massive CME hitting the earth just a few years after the end of the COVID pandemic. It was written during the pandemic and it occasionally reads like an allegory about it. Scientists and space agencies that study the sun are constantly on the lookout for CMEs and can tell if one is headed towards the earth. If another Carrington-sized CME was headed for us, we’d have about twelve to eighteen hours to shut down our power grids or risk having them all fried when the ejected particles hit the earth’s magnetosphere. In Koepp’s novel, the federal government warns all state governments that they should shut down their power grids immediately, to save lives and to protect infrastructure. But, as with the pandemic, every state governor seems to want to go his own way, the federal government proves to be inept at forcing safety regulations on the nation, and eventually all of the bureaucratic infighting simply aggravates the situation. The CME hits the magnetosphere, fries the power grids of most of the countries on earth, and thus begins our thriller begins (curiously, countries along the equator are less at risk from CMEs than those closer to the poles, so a few African and South American countries manage to avoid the worst of the disaster).
Koepp’s story focuses on two primary characters: a Silicon Valley tech billionaire named Thomas Banning (think Elon Musk but without the charm and charisma) and Aubrey Wheeler, a small-business operator living in Aurora, Illinois. It seems heavy-handed to me for Koepp to place a story about an auroral event in a town called Aurora but, hey, heavy-handedness isn’t a crime in a pop-fiction thriller. I think the title of the book is a mistake. “Aurora” is a pretty word but doesn’t exactly evoke thrills and chills. At various times in the novel the CME and its aftermath are described as “solar chaos” and as a “black-sky event,” both of which would have made better titles than Aurora. Also confusing is that the book’s main character is named Aubrey, a word so close to Aurora, that I kept having to remind myself that the main character wasn’t a woman named Aurora living in a town called Aubrey during a period of auroral chaos. (The aroral event does, indirectly, resurrect Aubrey’s moribund sex life, so I suppose Koepp could have titled the book Auroral Sex, though I’m fairly certain that would have been a mistake; my backup recommendation, Solar Fart, would probably also be a nonstarter).
Anywho, our two main characters couldn’t be more different. Aubrey’s life is a bit of a train wreck. Years earlier she married a handsome contractor named Rusty, who turned out to be a colossal loser. He got addicted to gambling and fentanyl and Aubrey eventually divorced him. Rusty moved out of Aubrey’s life, more or less, but left behind Scott, his fifteen-year-old son from a previous relationship. Scott is not exactly a model citizen. He sells weed, does poorly in school, and disrespects his stepmother frequently. Aubrey isn’t too enamored of Scott, but she’s too kind-hearted to kick him out of her house, and she knows that sending him to live with his father would be a disaster for the boy. And so she and Scott live together in a sort of awkward truce, barely communicating and trying to stay out of each other’s hair.
Our other main character, Thomas Banning, has a net worth of $4 billion and lives in Mountain View, California. He is a tech nerd, an engineer of sorts, and he has been anticipating some sort of cataclysmic event for a decade or more. As a result, he purchased a thousand acre site in Utah on which the U.S. government once housed intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos. Banning, who is married and has two children, has spent many years and millions of dollars building a high-tech survivalist compound on this site, which he calls Salvation. The compound is almost entirely underground in repurposed missile silos. The electricity for the site is provided by generators buried so deep underground that they cannot be crippled by the CME. If you have seen the recent HULU TV series A Murder at the End of the World, starring Clive Owen as a billionaire who builds a luxurious, high-tech family fortress deep underground in some desolate part of Iceland, then you have an approximation of what Banning’s Utah facility looks like. For years, Banning has been paying a doctor, a dentist, two master chefs, a yoga instructor, and a handful of other professionals an annual retainer in exchange for their agreement to go to the compound with him and his family if some worldwide cataclysm threatens the existence of human life on earth. No doubt these well-paid professionals thought Banning was a sucker and happily took his money assuming they’d never have to do anything to earn it. Alas, the coronal mass ejection has forced them all to gather in Utah with Banning and his family. One of these professionals is Marques, the professional pilot who flies Banning’s private jet. When Banning gets word that a CME will hit the earth in about twelve hours, he orders Marques to fly him and his family from California to Utah. The plane has to be out of the air before the CME hits the magnetosphere or else its power system will be fried and it will fall from the sky. Marques meets Banning and his wife and two children at an airfield in Half Moon Bay, California, and they prepare to board the plane. But Marques refuses to leave unless he can bring along a young woman and a little girl whom he claims are his wife and daughter (they aren’t). Banning is furious. He intentionally chose Marques as his emergency pilot because he believed him to be single and childless. Banning doesn’t want to bring the extra passengers but, possessing no piloting skills, he has no choice. Angrily he allows Marques to bring his “family” with him. And so, a few hours later, The Banning family and Marques’s “family” arrive at the Utah compound. Already there are the doctor, the dentist, the chefs, and a bunch of other professionals who are prepared to bunker down in the luxurious compound for the duration of the disaster.
The story mostly alternates back and forth between Aubrey in Aurora and Thomas in Utah. At first it is difficult to understand what connects these two, but soon we learn that Aubrey is Thomas’s younger, by four years, sister. The two have been largely estranged since some mysterious rift occurred between them when she was fifteen and he was nineteen. We won’t learn the reason for this rift until much later in the novel. But, though Banning is a crappy husband and a largely heartless human being, he nonetheless feels a great deal of responsibility (fueled by guilt) towards his sister who, since the deaths of their parents, is his only surviving link to his childhood. Before the CME hits the magnetosphere, he calls Aubrey and urges her to let him fly her to the Utah compound. She refuses. The CME by itself isn’t expected to kill anyone. It’s simply going to deprive the earth of electrical power for a few weeks or months. Those on life-supporting machines in hospitals and care homes will be dead after the power goes out. But most Americans are expected to survive, although there is widespread fear that the country will descend into chaos and anarchy. In any case, Aubrey would rather take her chances with chaos and anarchy (and her no-longer-stepson Scott) than hole up with her estranged brother at his luxurious Utah compound.
This, in my opinion, is a great set up. We’ve got a sci-fi thriller element that is within the realms of possibility. We’ve got a worldwide calamity barreling down on humanity. We’ve got a tech billionaire who is every bit as hateable as most real-life tech billionaires. And we have a plucky young woman with little money or material resources but plenty of grit and imagination. Curiously, we also have a villain named Zielensky, but that name probably didn’t mean much to Koepp when he was writing the novel. Since February of 2022, however, a slight variation on that name Zelenskyy, has been in the news almost every day. But the real-life Zelenskyy, unlike the fictional Zielensky, is a hero.
Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of Koepp’s novel is watching how Thom Banning, who thinks he has prepared for every eventuality, proves to be unequal to the task of protecting himself and his family from the chaos unleashed by the CME. Like so many giants of the corporate world, he is much better at dealing with money than dealing with people. His people skills are so bad that almost immediately he begins to lose members of his highly-paid staff of professionals. His dentist decides early on that he’d rather take his chances waiting out the electrical outage back in his own neighborhood than spend it in a luxurious compound where he will have to put up with the dictatorial behavior of his employer. Soon several others follow suit. Banning can’t seem to get anyone – especially his wife – to follow his orders. Soon Mrs. Banning and Marques are engaged in an affair right under Banning’s nose and there is not much he can do about it.
Meanwhile, back in Aurora, Aubrey is facing enormous challenges every day in a world that has, partially at least, descended into chaos, and yet she is faring better than her billionaire brother is. In fact, never a big fan of TV or other electronic entertainments, Aubrey is sort of enjoying the respite from electricity. Her world would be a fairly peaceful one if not for the fact that her ex-husband, Rusty, and some of his underworld pals, get it into their heads that Thom Banning would not have left his little sister without financial resources during a time of worldwide panic and food shortages. They assume that Thom will be sending a big shipment of cash to Aubrey to help her get through the ordeal. Credit cards no longer work, and those shop owners who are still operating are demanding huge cash payments for their wares. And so Rusty and his pals put together a scheme that will challenge even the pluck and resourcefulness of Aubrey Wheeler. This leaves the reader wondering whether it will be Thom who fares better during the crisis or Aubrey. Or will either of them manage to come out of it alive?
I don’t want to say too much more about the plot. I recommend that you buy the book and discover what happens for yourself. Keopp, as mentioned in my last piece, is one of the best screenwriters currently at work in the popular cinema. And judging from Cold Storage and Aurora, if he had pursued novel writing rather than screenwriting as his primary profession, he probably could have become as successful at it as Stephen King or Michael Crichton. Is Aurora as much fun to read as Cold Storage? I dunno. Exploding green zombies are an awfully difficult act to follow. But Aurora is a very good piece of pop fiction. It is filled with thrills and surprising plot twists. Also, because it was written mid-pandemic, it seems to be an interesting commentary on how Americans react to a sudden-onset emergency. If you like your pop thrillers straight, without any social commentary, you may wanna stick with the exploding zombies of Cold Storage. But you really ought to read both books. I’m sure they will end up on the big screen someday (Cold Storage is already in production) but why wait for the Hollywood treatment when the literary treatment is available right now?