We begin with something tightly focused on one character, Yuri Eden Jones, but then builds up a range of characters to the point where we have an ensemble that we know of and care about. Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out…įor a book which has basic SF tropes at its core, it is surprisingly contemporary in tone, taking old SF ideas (colonisation, space travel, strange alien species) and imbuing them with a modern twist. 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. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. For Proxima is not your typical ‘outwards to the stars’ novel, in fact, often the opposite.įrom the book: 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. I’m pleased to see that we’re back to big Epic themes here, although you may be surprised at the start. Which is why I’m reading this one about a year after its first release (although the paperback is now imminent, due October 2014). 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.I’m a fan of Stephen’s books, but if I’m honest, recently I’ve not kept up. How would it be to live on such a world? Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out. 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. 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. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light. 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.

The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs.

Proxima by Stephen Baxter