Proxima: Book 1

By: Stephen Baxter

Narrated by: Kyle McCarley

Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Baxter's Best

What an incredible journey this book is. It's not at all what I was expecting it to be when I started it. It is, I think, Baxter's finest book yet in a career of incredible hard sci fi adventures.

I have been reading Baxter for about 15 years, starting with his Xeelee sequence, and have been a fan ever since. I felt some of his more recent work, like the Long Earth trilogy, were vastly inferior to what he'd done in the past, and others, like the Flood/Ark duology, were so mind-numbingly depressing as to be almost not worth reading. But Proxima is just what I needed from Baxter: a perfect blend of hard sci fi adventure and discovery, with the undertones of vast cosmic machinations you'd expect from vintage Baxter works.

The story has a rich palette of characters, more than any I can remember in any of his recent works. Baxter has been criticized for having very limited characterization, which I think is a somewhat fair assessment, but this book featured a host of distinct, three-dimensional characters with very different perspectives, motivations, and backgrounds. The main character is Yuri Eden, a man sent on a one-way trip to Proxima, the nearest star to our solar system, along with a crew of rag-tag ne'er-do-wells, to colonize the planet in preparation for future human expansion. Think the British colonization of Australia with convicts, only in space. Things...don't go smoothly as you might expect.

From this point, Baxter launches into a deeply complex bit of world-building, creating an interplanetary human society in the twenty-second century, which has survived the calamitous "jolts" of climate change and are faced with a cold war between the two economic superpowers of the time, the U.N. and China. Realistic physics and space travel mechanics abound, as usual for Baxter. On Proxima itself, Baxter imagines a rich world where life evolved very differently from on Earth, but also more similarly than it ought to have. Mysteries build upon mysteries as the colonists of Prox seek to survive and cope with their situation, while back in the solar system, shocking discoveries are made on Mercury.

The story kept me in suspense most of its run time. Baxter has greatly evolved his craft of storytelling. He avoids cliches deftly and brings one unexpected twist after another with each chapter. You'll never believe where things ultimately end up by the book's end. And underneath all the human drama is the looming presence of something far greater and far more disturbing. Events on Prox, and in the solar system, haven't happened by chance. What it all means is not resolved by the end of the novel. Rather, it ends on multiple cliffhangers with only a glimmer of the vaster things to come. This is the first book in a series of at least two, so don't go into it expecting everything to get wrapped up. Nevertheless, you will find yourself unable to stop listening as the plot drives further and further toward its conclusion. I cannot wait for book two, Ultima.

If you're a fan of Baxter, this is a no-brainer to get. It's his best work in years, and shows his evolution as a writer, thinker, and story-teller. If you're new to Baxter, you could hardly ask for a more accessible, exciting, and relevant hard sci fi novel to start on. It's easily the best sci fi book I've read this year, and perhaps in the last several.

The narrator is fantastic. His native accent is British, but he can do thoroughly convincing American and Australian accents effortlessly. His Hisapnic accents aren't quite as polished, but they're also not as frequent. His reading of the material was perfect: serious, sometimes grave, with excellent inflection and diction. I loved his performance and will be looking forward to hearing him again on other books, especially the next book in this series, I sincerely hope.

Wins on both concepts AND character levels

This well-structured space opera manages to deliver both a engaging character-driven drama as well as some jaw-dropping wonders of an alien BDO (Big Dumb Object). Baxter tells a multi-narrative story from various character perspectives over a lifetime, and divides the action across two star systems.

One protagonist, a press-ganged colonist named Yuri Eden, is dragged across interstellar space to be abandoned on a hostile new world to establish a human foothold along with a scattering of other unwilling exiles. Their story of survival over several decades brutally demonstrates both the dangers of human psychological isolation as well as an unfamiliar and alien environment. There is some interesting and exotic biota, although he keeps it to only three or four varieties, which I was engaged enough to have wanted more. A good deal of research and calculation must have gone into determining what the conditions of such a world must be, and Baxter goes into convincing depth of detail describing weather, geology, etc.

Where I thought the story really shined, however, was in the other main narrative back on the Earth, where a catastrophic conflict is brewing between two power blocks. A physicist named Stephanie Kalinski finds herself caught in between the two as the alien artifacts she’s spent her career studying become the central prize that they are contesting. Neither the miracle alien power source nor the alien wormhole gateway are all that unique in SF literature, but Baxter introduces an unexpected twist when Stephanie’s first encounter with one of the artifacts generates a full-grown twin sister, complete with an altered history and memory of this new character for all but Steph herself, who alone recalls her sister-less past timeline. This mid-story twist came quite unexpected, and is among the many teased mysteries left for the subsequent series installment(s) to further address.

Bland

I love SciFi, but nothing about this book snatched my attention. Maybe the next book in the series will grab me and this book was just a precursor.

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.

No Sense of Conclusion

Even a series novel should be able to stand alone on its own merits. This book left way too many people, themes, and plot twists hanging. After giving the story more than 17 hours of my life, I experienced a dramatic let-down. I feel disappointed for getting involved in the first place. Just as the characters betrayed each other, the entire story betrays the reader with an unworthy ending. It ran out of fuel--and I don't know if I want to put this much energy into book two.

Very good first in a series

Any additional comments?

I liked the story though it did seem to skip an explanation or two. Hope the second book is at least as good. I had a very hard time remembering that is was daylight ALL the time. I can't imagine that....