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Stephen Baxter

Proxima Hardcover – 19 September 2013

by Stephen Baxter (Author)

385 ratings

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Arrives: 24 March - 8 April

An awe-inspiring Planetary Romance from Terry Pratchett's co-author on the Long Earth Books

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.

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Product details

Publisher : Gollancz (19 September 2013)
Language : English
Hardcover : 464 pages
ISBN-10 : 0575116838
ISBN-13 : 978-0575116832
Dimensions : 15.8 x 3.8 x 24 cm

Customer Reviews:
385 ratings

Product description

Review

Baxter's specialty is hard hard SF (and he's very good at it)...we're sufficiently hooked to want to come back for more. Classic Baxter. (Guy Haley SFX MAGAZINE)

Once again, Baxter proves himself a master of the epic canvas with alternating narratives, both terrifically imagined and addictively compelling. (Harry Ritchie Daily Mail)

A seriously impressive read. Simply magnificent. (Antony SF Books)

Proxima brilliantly juxtaposes the wonder of an uncaring universe with the depiction of humanity's valiant struggle to survive against all odds (Eric Brown The Guardian)

Book Description

An awe-inspiring Planetary Romance from the author of FLOOD and the epic Xeelee sequence.

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5 star		50%
4 star		29%
3 star		12%
2 star		6%
1 star		3%

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Imagine buying the second book in a series first!

Reviewed in Australia on 22 December 2019

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I bought the second book
Incomprehensible
Not a winner
Then I realised it was the second book of the series...
🤦🏻‍♂️
Proxima is the first
A rollicking space opera
A few discordant notes
But good hard sci fi
Back to book 2 👍🏼

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Mshell

Good read

Reviewed in Australia on 10 April 2016

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I like this book, 40 pages from the end I was buying the next one to go on with. Mr. Baxter, why do you have hardly any works of your own and always work with others? Good team work, however I'd like to read more by you. M

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Delta November

with good initial characters

Reviewed in Australia on 10 August 2015

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An interesting plot for a book, with good initial characters. It was somewhat disappointing to see favoured characters quickly growing old through the forward jumps in time throughout the book, but the story itself was fascinating.

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Amazon Customer

Enchanting read

Reviewed in Australia on 25 June 2017

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Highly imaginative.
No a typical space adventure, none of the glorified space travel we are used too.
This book is for the restless kind.

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Dermot Tomelty

fantastic

Reviewed in Australia on 28 March 2014

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Will there be more? God I hope so. Can not wait to see what happens. A little unsure on what happened with the mind talking for two chapters????

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Peter L Carr

Classic Baxter

Reviewed in Australia on 3 August 2014

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Classic Baxter with big clever concepts. Not his best work, but good enough.

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Simon Franklin

Excellent Sci-Fi

Reviewed in Australia on 17 November 2019

It is not often that you find that sci-fi book with the right mix of character development, top-notch story telling and solid science, compiled into a thoroughly entertaining mix. Excellent book that I think deserves the 5 star treatment.

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M. Brookes

Damn fine sci-fi

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 October 2016

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This is some damn fine science fiction. It ticked all the right boxes for me for what I consider to make essential sci-fi reading. So much so that it's one of those reviews where I get to list all the good things, without having to worry about the negative. A rare please :-)

For me science fiction is at it's best when tackling big questions, or for tight character led stories, and we are fortunate in having both here. There are a few big issues being tackled here, such as how humanity tackles resource scarcity post significant climate change. It looks at how we expand into the Solar System, from a practical, and from political perspectives. And perhaps the main one is how we explore, and then colonise another star system.

In answering these challenges with well researched consequence the author builds a believable world encompassing humanity's future. Although the binary nature of the politics does lack the nuance you'd expect for such events. Beyond that he constructs an alien world that is plausible and fascinating. The alien ecology is drawn with respectable detail and I loved the main life forms of the builders. They struck me as a novel creation, and one that managed to feel alien, as well as understandable.

There's a strong blend of characters here, including human and AI. For the human characters Yuri really stood out for me. He possessed a practicality, but also a sense of being out of his own time that appealed to me. Even better are the various AI characters, they each had their own characteristics that demonstrated being of a different order of intelligence, and personality, but also differentiated between each other. In particular the robot companion added some feeling to the colonisation threads.

Set against all this is a somewhat esoteric mystery relating to a discovered energy source, and some trapdoors. The applications of these are explored, but their meaning is only hinted at in this book. I've already bought the next book in the hopes of finding out more!

3 people found this helpful

Derek Smith

Old style space opera, but some interesting twists

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 May 2019

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I'll get the negatives over first. There were a few, but too many, grammatical errors. Hardly uncommon with Kindle I'm afraid. My main irritation was the number of plot lines that were not explained. For instance, the twins. I'm now reading the sequel and I can see them being developed. I feel a book should stand on its own. Other than that, it moved along at a comfortable pace. Lots of various stories more or less intertwined. It was very readable and a page turner. I liked it. Not cheap but reasonable. I opted for the library to source part II.

2 people found this helpful

PRL

Some good ideas but overlong.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 July 2020

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Some of the ideas in this book are quite interesting.

Some, relating to human behaviour, are pretty daft. For example, if you wanted to find colonists for a new planet you would have people queuing up and would be able to select those best mentally suited to the task rather than forcing people to go against their will, and thus not having their hearts in the project.

It's also much too long. The story could support ~300 pages quiet well. Nearly 500 is quite heavy going in parts.

R. A. S. Brown

A fun and realistic interstellar adventure!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 March 2014

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Stephen Baxter's novels are always very readable and full of believable science and technology. Baxter clearly draws on a lot of history for inspiration for this tale of interplanetary exploration and colonisation. The press ganging of various waifs and strays into being colonists reminds you of the forced transport of convicts to Australia. The struggle of the early colonists just to survive with next to no facilities reminds you of tales of the early New World colonies. The way the groups of settlers banded together to try and make something work was told. Having studied some planetary science I can confirm that Baxter's planet is very plausible. Good science. I liked the aliens as well who were genuinely alien but also recognisable as a fellow sentient species.

I thought the main weakness was the characters who were all a bit bland (even the main antagonist Yuri Eden) except for the automated colonisation unit ColU who was interested in everything and constantly waffled on a bit like Star Trek's Data. I want one!! I also didn't like the stuff in our future solar system, China vs the rest, seemed plausible but I just didn't enjoy the politics. I felt that he could have left the Earth and its troubles behind once the colonists had landed.

Overall though I really enjoyed the novel and found it to be a bit of a page turner. He's left it open for a sequel so we shall see what's next.

4 people found this helpful

Craig Bryan

Sci-Fi as it should be

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2014

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Stephen Baxter is back to doing what he does best - writing good, thought-provoking science fiction.
I loved the Xeelee sequence and the Time/Space books and tried to read all of Baxters stories. Sadley, he lost my interest with the Floods and mammoths but now with Proxima, it seems the he is back to his roots and writing the kind of classic hard sci-fi that got my interest in the first place.
I hope this isn't a one off and that we can now expect more like this.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone like me that enjoyed his older works. I can't rate it highly enough.

If I had to choose a negative just to balance things out, then I would say that maybe in the appendix we could have had a translation of the latin paragraph that appears toward the end of the book. I had to type it in to Google Translate to get an approximate meaning and it made a HUGE difference to how I perceived the end of the story. I'm sure not everyone will do the same and will miss out! I would urge everyone that doesn't speak Latin, to do what I did. It's a little annoying typing a paragraph of Latin but it does make a difference to the story.

7 people found this helpful

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