Proxima

By: Stephen Baxter

Narrated by: Kyle McCarley

The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light...

The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world?

Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out...

PROXIMA tells the amazing tale of how we colonise a harsh new eden, and the secret we find there that will change our role in the Universe for ever.

Read by Kyle McCarley

(p) 2014 Tantor, Inc©2013 Stephen Baxter

Good narrating.

It's an ok story, kind of run-of-the-mill sci-fi characters and a lazy ending. I was expecting more from Baxter.

So boring I couldn't make myself finish it

I only listened for an hour, but I lost focus all the time. fell asleep twice

the first half isn't bad. the second is.

The first half of the book is very nice. Combining several story arcs that are interesting to follow, and seem like a nice build up, even if a bit heavy on the descriptive side.
Then the book finished the story lines quite abruptly, and just goes on with the descriptions. They are very detailed descriptions but they seem to lead nowhere.
The story lines don't combine with each other. They are replaced with new stories that don't make much sense - except that they give the author more opportunities to describe stuff.
I counted 3 episodes where the narrator describes what is seen outside the window of a moving car.

I kept on listening hoping for the stories to come together. They don't. Maybe in the sequel they will, but I won't bother finding out.