Proxima: Book 1

By: Stephen Baxter

Narrated by: Kyle McCarley

The very far future: The galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, and 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 a thousand others, is about to find out.

©2013 Stephen Baxter (P)2014 Tantor

complex and cohesive

complex and cohesive, I loved the long time scale of the story and interstellar scope.

Baxter is the SF master.

World building, character arcs, cosmic themes, and writing style make this another 5 star novel. The narration was excellent.

Engaging and couldn’t stop listening

This is my first audio book and it was a little hard to get used to it. But once I did, I couldn’t stop, I had to know how this ended. The story is gripping and the science is exciting. My only gripes are: it skips ahead in time a little too much and the relationships between the primary characters are a bit lackluster. Otherwise a very fun read.

Great book!

Great book! If you liked Spin or The Long Earth, I think you will like this.

Gripping, pulls you along

The ending felt like an unexpected traverse into a different genre of Sci Fi, but lovely otherwise. Baxter nicely opened my imagination with multiple types of characters that could exist in the future, while tying the plot together well enough that it didn't feel like a forced data dump of ideas. The performance is excellent.