Proxima (A Proxima Novel)

Pretty interesting tech. I had thought I had pegged this novel in the first chapter. Wrong. I don't wish to give anything away however. It is interesting how the problems of AIs that we accept now are not addressed I this novel. And they could they if one is to have that story angle.

The drive system reminds me of one from an old Analog serial or novella. I really should work the math for those accelerations.

As one gathers from the title of this review I suspect there will be another novel.

And who is the main character anyway?

I found the story exciting and engaging, like so much of Stephen's work. The mystery surrounding the main character and the artifacts kept my interest and I can't wait for the sequel! Highly recommended!

Very cynical perspective of interstellar colonization. Very class conscious characters who seem to have little racial bias makes the author way too easy to identify as from Great Britian. Why do English authors think everyone shares the English culture? Poor development of life and ecology of colony planet, Per Ardua. Waaaay too much unexplained science and frankly, none of the characters were well enough developed to be interesting. The last few pages were just plain awful - blaming the destruction of Earth on the Per Ardua stick people

Last sentence chapter 36 is incorrect.
The drive has been shut down to flip the ship .
The ship will only slow down when the drive
is 're-engaged. It will not once again do anything but slowdown.

This book started well enough and I enjoyed the story about abandoned colonists on an distant planet. Yuri Eden grew as a character and was slowly developing as the central point. All novels require someone you care about. But the earth based story arc was tedious, sketchy and, frankly, boring. I began to flick thru pages more and more. Without spoiling the plot, lets just say that it all ends rather badly. But by the end, I could not have cared less. Some promising ideas had been reduced to a slush.
I cared about the ColU too. This guy was smart, inquisitive, genuinely empathetic. Rather too little was made of him in the closing pages.
Overall, I would not recommend this book. It needs a serious edit, to shorten it down considerably.

An excellent take on the habitability of planets in the Galaxy. It includes the latest scientific results and couples that to the old idea about "galactic overlords" i.e. Older beings manipulating younger species through space and time.

A nice science fiction yarn from Baxter - interplanetary colonisation and exploration with sides of intrigue back in the Solar System and alien mysteries. Ends with three or four mysteries in play and a mind-blowing cliffhanger.

SPOILERS BELOW:
I wanted to like this book but like other reviews have mentioned there are many flaws in it. The worst for me was the press-gang method used in getting "colonists". Basically arresting totally inexperienced people with no skills for colonizing a new world and putting them on a slow boat to the stars seemed ridiculous to me. Even in a world filled with Luddites, I would still believe that there would be many talented people with the right skill sets who'd want to go on the journey.

I also agree with other reviewers that the lack of using cryogenics on the trip, which were obviously available, was another glaring error. Why make the people live through the journey? Especially when they were prisoners. At the very least the amount of resources needed would have been substantially cut down if most of the colonists were frozen.

Some of the science was interesting, especially about the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars. But I found the characters very unlikable and forgettable. The use of the hatches seemed contrived - sort of like a Deus ex machina. I read the reviews on the back of the paperback version and wondered if these people read the same book I did. The Daily Mail UK review excerpt: "Terrifically imagined and addictively compelling." Addictively compelling? I had to push myself to finish this book and I skimmed through chunks of unimaginative prose to do so. Terrifically imagined? For me not even close.

My hope is that I never find myself on the earth in this story, nor in the universe depicted by the author. Will I read the follow up? No. I'm not interested in finding out anything more about the characters in the story. And to me that is the saddest statement I can make about the book

INTERESTING UPDATE 7/7/2017 - I have been to a number of scientific talks on extra solar planets. It turns out that red dwarf stars are the most numerous stars in our galaxy and a good percentage of them have planets in the habitable zone. Also red dwarf stars can potentially last trillions rather than billions of years.

Novel appears to be about colonization of a distant planet, Proxima. The set up is already absurd -- "Let's drop 14 random people in various places with few supplies and without even a radio and expect them to populate the planet .. oh, and here is an advanced AI robot, see you later." Despite this illogic, the story moves along pretty well on Proxima and the descriptions and conflicts are interesting. If only he had kept to this story line, Baxter would have a great novel here and I probably would have given 4 stars. But noooo, Baxter loses his mind. Suddenly there is a total change to the story. A "Hatch" shows up on Proxima for no apparent reason other than to let some characters go back to Earth through inexplicable light-speed travel. This then allows Baxter to blow up Earth for no apparent reason, at least no reason related to Proxima. The poor people on Proxima are just abandoned by Baxter. So, you aren't really reading a novel about colonization of a distant planet at all! And BTW, tune in for the next exciting episode wherein our heroes go through yet another Hatch for no apparent reason and end up on a completely different world populated by ancient Romans who speak Latin to them. Whatever drugs Baxter is using, they must be powerful.

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!

Sorry, I couldn't stick with this book. The apalling stupidity of the premise just put me off and I couldn't keep going.

-- minor spoilers that probably won't interfere with your reading of the book --

Hypothetically, if one were planning to colonize a distant planet, would one choose compleletly ignorant and untrained personnel to do it? No, one would not. Would one dump them down on the planet with little more than camping gear and say, "good luck, suckers!"

Maybe the novel gets good later on, I'll never know.

"What have the bloody Romans ever done for us?" Well, they sure as hell didn't help the ending of this book make any more sense! I like hard sci-fi and I was looking forward to a good story about humans trying to survive in a world with a completely alien environment. The beginning didn't make a lot of sense, but I read on expecting things to come together later on. By a third of the way through, the only motivation I had for reading on was to see just how bad it could get. It was as if Baxter was channeling Douglas Adams (author of Hitch Hiker's Guide the the Galaxy) while writing this, with the plot getting more absurd without any comedy relief. Character development was abysmal, with the best developed and most sympathetic character being a work robot!

I hated this book, but I will give it 2 stars only because Stephen Baxter tried to deal with a lot of the science in a realistic way. He did try to handle the stellar flares, radiation, the biology on a tidally locked planet, and the different, incompatible biochemistry, so the extra star is for effort. The final fate of Dexter Cole was just disgusting and absurd, as if it was written by a middle school kid, and made me want to leave a flaming bag of dog poo on the author's front porch.

[spoilers!!]
While I loved the survival story and exquisite ecosystem descriptions I felt let down by the book overall. There are numerous similarities with elements from other Baxter stories and it seemed like a bit of a rehash in the end.
- Surviving a cooling environment with a "cow" as high-tech nanny. Wasn't this the story at the end of Ring? Or one of the stories in Vacuum Diagrams?
- A multi-dimensional portal that primitives explore and go through - same reference
- Survival story of one couple - Titan
- Chinese wrecking everything - Titan
- Sterilisation events - One of the Manifold stories
- People plucked from different eras - I'm guessing this is the SPQR - Evolution
- Escape for a few, based on miraculous alien intervention - just about everything
- Yuri = Reid Malenfant
- Mardina = Madeline Mneacher
- Earthshine = Nemoto
- Ageline = Squids
And so on.

Many of Baxter's works are nihilistic, describing a sad end to the Universe and almost always humanity, and this book is no exception. I found that a bit of a downer as the middle section - exploring Prox C - gave me some hope. And so I was not prepared for the wiping-things-clean that is dropped on us in the last ten pages.

Anyway, I'm nut sure I'll be rushing out to read Ultima as my bat-sense says that having Romans in spaceships is corny, and more the stuff of Doctor Who and the original Star Trek. I hope ColU thrives; dont really care for anyone else.

The book has enough material for many stories. The early stories involve two efforts to send interstellar exploration to an earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri, but I cannot see why anyone would do what was done here because there was no real way of knowing whether the effort was successful. Then there is a real attempt to colonize it, but with all the money that must be spent to do this, wouldn't you expect that they would try to maximize their chances of making this work? Instead, the settlers seem to be captive misfits, with no real training, and very undersupplied. These misfits are dropped off in small groups in various places with little equipment, perhaps in the hope that Darwinian evolution will lead to finding out what works. Apart from this being a rather odd way to go about things, nobody on Earth will ever know anyway, so why do it this way? What happens next is hardly encouraging, but then, to add to the settlers' troubles, some sort of ice age starts. Meanwhile, on Earth, tensions increase between the Chinese and the rest, the rest having a strange new material found on Mercury that opens new physics. Then a sequence of events unfolds that did not really make a lot of sense to me. People should do things that gain something, but these events do not seem to connect. Maybe life can be like that, but do we need that in a story? What is the take-away message? Then the ending is not really an ending at all, and perhaps signals a sequel.

Baxter writes well, but the structure is awkward. It is fair to create mysteries, but for me the story should resolve at least some of them. The description of Per Ardua (the planet near Proxima) is highly imaginative, and has a good description of the physical environment (although I am unsure there would be an ice age, but then again I do not know that much about M stars) and there is a very imaginative alien ecology. Well done. The political future is depressing, although I suppose it could not be ruled out. However, the resolution of that made no sense to me, because nobody seems to follow a sensible strategy whereby they could come out ahead. The characters do not seem to adapt to their situation, and there are two, who are either sisters or not sisters, and this is yet another issue that is introduced but not resolved. It is this introduction of unresolved issues that could well be left out of the story because they do not alter it that irritated me. Finally, the various threads are sliced and diced, then mixed, not necessarily in sequence. Some will find that that generates tension, but it merely irritates me. I may be being too harsh in this review, but I felt that this could have been a really great story, but its structural defects spoiled it.

This is an interesting take on the usual colony ship theme, and in parallel, an orthodox take on the "Ancients who Built Amazing Things" theme. Collectively, Baxter weaves them into a brutal and grim vision of a dystopian future society that is more likely than the peace and love kind we often get in high tech sci-fi novels.

The protagonist for a lot of the action, and across both themes of the novel, is Yuri Jones, a battered and bruised individual who just wants to fly under the radar but cannot seem to stay at ground level for long. So we find him in the thick the action right from the start, and while I can't dwell on that for fear of giving things away, our introduction to him and his plight is a master class in how to quickly sketch a losing hand in life.

As the Book Description notes, Yuri finds himself four light years from Earth, colonizing Proxima IV, a tidally locked planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. The colonists are besieged on all fronts, from the inept UN policies that landed them there to the sheer drudgery of having to make soil before anything will grow in this most foreign of climes, to the strangeness of an eternal day with the sun perpetually hanging at the same location in the sky. This is not a well-planned colony, and it shows from start to end.

Meanwhile back on Earth (well, strictly speaking Mercury is where most of the action is), those "Ancients who Built Amazing Things" theme is being played out as an intelligent but immature woman, an AI from the bad old days of Global Warming (about now for anyone looking for a cautionary tale) and a jovial squillonaire with an Australian accent seek to uncover the secrets of an amazing energy source that gives the UN control of the inner solar system with their fast space ships and point-to-point routes while the Chinese use traditional `slow boats' on gravity slingshots to take possession of the outer solar system.

What I liked about all this was how Baxter paints the inhumane and violent nature of the Proxima IV colony. Truly, it's a wonderful depiction of the means justifying the ends, and if the ends are planting your flag on another world to keep the hands of the Chinese off, well, this is certainly one way to do it. We join Yuri's slow awakening as he and an endearing mechanized farming AI slowly and lethargically unpick the mystery that is Proxima IV. To be fair, the mechanics of the colony make little sense, but perhaps I'm just cynical enough to enjoy the absurdity, because I could easily imagine SNAFU and FUBAR partnering within Government Departments to deliver an outcome something along these lines.

In comparison to Proxima IV, I found the solar system side of things of less compelling. There was a lot of high-tech, but most of it was unexplained, even at a theoretical level. And the edit-my-past aspect seemed more magic than physics (and poorly done at that, which was even more baffling). There was also a lot of politics - UN vs. China being the primary chest beating - that was realistic but too drawn out. And maybe I've read too much sci-fi over the years, but the 'mystery' inherent in Mercury was not so much a mystery to me as a frustrating "When are they going to...?" Despite the necessary links being put in place between the two story threads to sustain the plot, it was almost as if Baxter had two books in mind and then decided they might work better merged. Or perhaps he just got carried away with the intricacies of his Byzantine plots, I'm not sure but certainly this felt less integral to the story.

Nonetheless, there was an outstandingly brave development on this side of the plot thread, and it's one that I've not come across too often. Obviously, I'm not going to spoil things, but it absolutely puts the acid back on the Proxima IV storyline and literally creates a cliffhanger of an ending. The audacity of what Baxter does is terrific and I quite liked the uncompromising approach that he adopts to pull this off.

This is a solid sci-fi novel with a strong character driven aspect in the colony world of Proxima IV. There were some equally interesting characters back in the solar system, but the main one was less interesting to me because she seemed tetchy for no good reason. I just wanted her to grow up, and when she did, that wasn't much better.

"Proxima" is standalone in that the cliffhanger does not need to be resolved or explained for this to be satisfying read in its own right. But it does seem that we're in for a sequel or two, and that's OK with me. I enjoyed where this ended and I'll happily buy the next in the sequence.

I often wondered after reading The Fatal Shore about Australia's founding, what would happen if you applied the same process to interstellar colonization? Proxima is that book, featuring on a group of people who are forced against their will to settle a habitable world in the Alpha Centauri system. After the disappointment of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, it was a nice change of pace to read a somewhat optimistic space opera about interstellar colonization. That said the book packs a few surprises and drifts away from the core concept a bit - but enters a more interesting realm. Baxter is a fantastic writer and he really described the alien world of Per Ardua very well - it's rich and I had no problem visualizing the place. Though it's hard to wrap your head around a world where it's permanent daylight. I do have a few annoyances with the book - it feels a bit unfocused - it's not quite clear who the main character is after you make it past a certain point. This being the first book in a new series, I felt a bit lost about things that had happened in the back story that weren't explained (like the 'Heroic generation' - they discuss it but not in detail). I also find using that the Chinese as the future 'big bad' was a little too easy and I found some of the events that transpired slightly unbelievable. The book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, I wasn't aware there was a sequel when I bought this. I'm very pleased that there is because I enjoy the world Baxter has built.

A lot of great descriptiveness, but that's all it was a lengthy description of many things and people. So there was a lot of restating stating the obvious and pointless filler dialogue. The best thing about the story was the descriptive biological sci-fi on the newly colonized planet. But other than that the main drivers of the political plot line of the story were just kind of stupid and ruined the experience. The ending of the book was fairly weak, as well as fairly bleak.

This is an enjoyable novel without being great. Baxter deftly handles science and technology elements in his characteristic manner, with most scenarios making sense. The lifetime scope of the novel, juggling relativistic aging variations, makes for a good yarn. The planetary locations, and that of the third planet of Proxima Centauri, are interesting and credible. However, it is these aspects of the novel that invite comparison to similar sci-fi sagas, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which are handles better. A lot happens to Baxter's diverse range of characters and the story takes many bleak turns, again characteristic of Baxter, but this does not in itself make the characters' behaviour credible or generate much empathy for them. Similarly, the plot elements, or contrivances, in Proxima are a triumph of ambition and complexity over credibility and, again, seem contrived.

Proxima is still a rich and enjoyable novel by a top author. Readers who enjoy complex extra-terrestrial ecologies - such as in Ian M Banks's Look to Windward - will enjoy the gradual revelation of the life-forms of Proxima C, or Per Ardua, even if the tie in to the plot hangs a little loose towards the end.

A very pessimistic and depressing view of humanity and a missed opportunity to introduce new concepts and things of interest on an Earthlike planet. Almost all of the characters are so flawed, petty, and even many are murderous that it just seemed to glory in the belief that humans suck even with some many chances to advance. This and many other recent novels are one thing I don't like about some of modern science fiction, a very negative view of the future with interplanetary war and destruction. Where are the current and recent novels that aren't of a utopian and sugary sweet, but believe that humankind can progress and have a better future?

Interesting description of conditions on a tidal locked planet huddled close to its M dwarf star. Very innovative aliens and biosphere. Baxter introduces several big ideas but sadly fails to flesh them out sufficiently beyond their initial introduction. Understandable in some respects as the novel is obviously the first of a series.

I find his characters insufficiently developed and not all that sympathetic except for the mobile ColU AI stranded with the Australian style penal colonists on Per Ardua. Baxter failed to sell me that a society so concerned about securing its new beachhead from the rival Chinese empire would just send miscreants of dubious capabilities given the huge cost of the enterprise and their great concern regarding the Chinese.

A good story, though it descends into implausible fantasy towards the end, and the book has no ending per se, a followup book continues the plot, which I won't read since story became less consistent and realistic about 3/4 along the way.

And even from the beginning, it made little sense that the colonists were unwilling participants, forced to move to the new stellar system, many with very dubious backgrounds, and were dropped there intentionally with very much less support than what they could have received (that becomes clear later in the book) and told to fend for themselves. It is stated that the organizers really cared about colony succeeding, but then why couldn't they find people who actually wanted to go, and did not help them as much as it was possible?

The first thing to realize about this novel is that it is really the first half of a tale finished by the follow-up volume titled Ultima -- the abrupt and confusing ending to Proxima. This first portion tells, for the most part, two stories. One is of the colonization of a world circling Proxima Centauri by rag-tag bands of misfits herded off to the planet by the successor to the United Nations, which is in an uneasy cold war with the forces of China. As noted by other reviewers, the strategy for colonization seems rather ridiculous and doomed to failure. It does succeed in part, however, and along the way we are given some nice descriptions of a well-thought-out but enigmatic alien ecology. The other side of the plot concerns tensions on Earth with respect to the UN-China rivalry, the aftermath of engineering hubris earlier in history, and the mysterious intentions of a small core of artificial intelligences which have dominated life on the planet for decades.

Through much of this book, Baxter weaves a compelling mix of plotlines and thematic counter-points, but in the last third I was waiting for a shoe to drop, which it really never did. And finding myself as I type this in the middle of the follow-up volume, it seems to me that several plot points which I thought would be significant have simply disappeared -- the story seems to have lost its way.

Another point which nags me is Baxter's treatment of the kernels, which are entities found on Mercury which appear to artifacts that are the source of enormous energy. They are very ill-defined -- I don't believe Baxter ever even describes them physically, and he certainly never provides even a hand-waving explanation of how they are utilized as power and propulsion sources. They really become a complete fantasy element here, with no effort by Baxter to make them seem real or believable. For someone who is touted as a major hard science writer, this is a first-class failure. The introduction of at least one alternate world with no preparation, explanation or investigation only compounds the problem.

Still, the book is worth the read, I suppose -- primarily for the depiction of life on Per Ardua, the colonized world, as well as the portrayal of the artificial intelligence known as Earthshine and its interaction with the rest of the characters. But this is no gem.

I can understand the criticisms leveled by other readers, but they didn't bother me. Perhaps on a second read I'll be more analytical, but last night and this morning, I had to finish this remarkable story to see what happened next.

Yes, some of the characters are unlovable, but I enjoyed some of the others, particularly the ag robot, ColU, meant to have a 25-year service life and to help the colonists by teaching them to farm, developing earth-type soils, helping them with all manner of knowledge.

"Proxima" is a distant star, with a presumably habitable fourth planet, and it is used as both a Gulag and an experimental colony. Without sufficient investigation, 1000 colonists are dumped into various locations with the expectation that, with no support, they will form viable human social groups and survive. Some of these colonists are political prisoners, some regular criminals, and at the last moment, when death loss occurs, the colony ship crew will be drafted to fill in minimum numbers per community drop.

Each group has been chosen for genetic diversity, and it's expected that they'll interbreed heavily, as there are only ten people per group. With ultimate incest as an apparent goal, each group has to settle the pecking order and determine their social behaviors. The strongest people in each cluster will take over, and if there is a disparity in the man-woman ratio, they will assure themselves of first pick. The groups are settled in wide dispersal, without particular concern for the suitability of each spot, especially with regard to the availability of water. An ag robot accompanies each community.

Their new home proves to have a rich ecology of creatures, from a type of fish to strange beings that are dubbed builders, who seem to spend all their time harvesting reeds from the wetlands and creating various constructions. They are thought to be dumb animals at first, but demonstrate later that they can actually communicate to a degree.

Each colony is expected to stay put and make a life right there. It turns out that the builders are able to channel waterways and move the local lake at their own whim, meaning that the colony has to move or else. The colony featured in most of the book goes through a dramatic series of changes as they begin developing their new home, and some become psychotic. Murder quickly comes to all the colonies, cutting the population still more.

Yuri Eden is a political prisoner, paying for the crimes of his parents, not his own, and he is taken from a Mars dome prison camp to live in this new colony. Mardina is one of the ship crew, and she finds herself dragooned into abandonment on this barren planet, expected to be a baby factory for her entire life. When she and Yuri are the only remaining survivors of their little encampment, this becomes a significant ethical question. As nomads, they move frequently to follow the water, and at last, come across other survivors. These social communities are more Lord of the Flies than a new Eden.

This is a complex story taking place on multiple planets, and a surprising connection appears between Mercury and Proxima IV. Life on Earth takes a surprising series of turns as well, with a galactic war being launched between the Chinese and the UN nations on multiple fronts.

Stephen Baxter has written some of my favorite books, such as "Moonseed" and "Titan," and this one joins them as a new favorite.

Character dialog is a chore to get through. Always arguing. Always an attitude. Very abrasive. All the characters come off as ignorant and slow. Concept is too, but the players are a bunch of nitpicking hens.

This story grabs you from the beginning and keeps you reading to the end. Its entertaining, but I do think it could've been better. I wish more time had been spent on the storyline of the people on Proxima and less on what was happening back in Earth's Solar System. I think a great deal more could have been done with the biological life forms on Proxima, but as it is they had a very small role to play in the whole story which I think is unfortunate. I also feel that the lifeforms were too simple and that more could have been done with the ecosystem of the planet and more complex lifeforms. The daily struggles of the people, I feel, could have been emphasized more. I'm glad there will be a sequel as some storylines seemed to just stop without giving you any real idea of why that character was so important in the first place. I think the story jumped forward in time much too quickly as well. All in all, a good read, but if your looking for something a bit more along the lines of a story about planet colonization I would got with Allen Steele's "Coyote".

I highly enjoyed reading this book most of the time, but two things bothered me enough to give it a middling rating. First, a lot of the basic plot and the characterizations are cliche. Second, while embracing a diverse cast the book feels like it was written from the standard white male heteronormative perspective. It of course was written from this perspective, but there are places where it just seems like the author didn't even try to make the characters three-dimensional. That is disappointing.

Like Ark, this is disappointing: excellent in parts, but the story is clumsy and forces the human relationships, the excellent hard SF vision is not pursued, reducing into space opera, and many aspects of society and technology are ignored to drive the plotlines. It looks like it needed more work before it was published. It is very evident that a sequel is expected, but I don't think I have been made to care enough to bother with it.

I'm not submitting a detailed review for this story because it turns out that I've only read, at most, half of it. The other half recently came out in a sequel called "Ultima." My main criticism of "Proxima" is that nothing on the covers or liner notes indicated that it was part of a series. My perception of "Proxima" as a standalone novel was an important factor in me choosing this book over other possibilities. I'm a Stephen Baxter fan but I prefer to read stories and sagas, however long, in one go. In other words, I read a series unless I have all the books close at hand so that I won't have gaps of weeks, months or years in between volumes. Just as bad, I felt that so much of the exposition in "Proxima" was repetitious and/or non-essential to the plot or character development that it could have been cut down to make room for the whole story to be published in one volume. Nevertheless, now that I've been left hanging in the middle of this trippy opera, I will try to get "Ultima" for free at the library someday and see whether or not it finds a wormhole that leads to respectability.

If you prefer Stephen Baxter's earlier novels, then I expect you'll enjoy Proxima, which to me is similar in style to his Xeelee sequence than his later efforts.

There is plenty of broad content, presented in a rich political background, with most of the action taking place on Proxima C, Mercury and Earth. While the Proxima C colonisation approach is hardly new (it was used to populate Australia), I found the description of the colonials' discovery of how life has adapted on a tidally locked planet the most enjoyable part of the book.

With a rather depressing ending, what will the sequel bring?

I was a little disappointed by the ending, because it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. But then I learned about the sequel.... Ultima, I'm ordering it *right now*. It did take me a couple of chapters to get into the premise. But the chapters themselves are very short, there are over 80 in the book. So it didn't take that long. It has been awhile since I read a book that left me tired at work the next day because I had trouble putting it down the night before. This was one of those.

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star far, far from the planets of Earth, the Moon, Mars, Mercury and all the other planets so familiar to present day Earthlings. The year is 2166 and laser beams of energy developed from kernel engineering can hurl a spaceship into different galaxies. Phases of history on Earth have passed, including a period of purging intelligent scientists who supposedly committed “crimes” (though never specified); and now there is an intellectual war about who will control the forces of energy with amazing potential for not only space travel but also creating new colonies on distant planets.
Yuri and Mardina were both forced to become colonists on Proxima or Per Adua as it is otherwise called. Their fellow inhabitants were initially a larger group; but uncontrolled feelings, thoughts and deeds caused several violent scenes in which many were murdered, leaving finally only Yuri and Mardina as survivors. There are other colonists somewhere on the planet but they were dumped in places far away and the chances of their meeting each other are slim indeed! For now Yuri, Mardina and a specialized robot ColU explore their new world. It appears that its living inhabitants are plant-like creatures, with a hidden eye, who are always busy building other plant-like structures and creating structures like dams to move or close water sources. Even the water contains bacterial life that is impossible to define by earth standards. However, thanks to the genius of ColU the species learn to live with each other, their only major problem the solar flares that could kill them if exposed.
Over a long period of time Mardina sets up a plan whereby she and Yuri will have children. Mardina refuses to believe no one will ever come to rescue them but Yuri thinks differently.
At the same time other subplots are happening that involve the battle over these super-kernels. Who obtains them and controls them can rule not only the earth but also other planets in the cosmos and beyond.
Eventually other settlers will join Yuri and Mardina and their lives will be irrevocably changed by a change coming to Proxima that will mandate their moving elsewhere. The “Hatch” will take them where they never dreamed of going; this is the discovery of a lifetime that totally shifts the plot of this novel.
Proxima is brilliant science fiction, the best this reviewer has read in more years than will be admitted. It’s hard science fiction with a complex plot interlaced with real scientific explanations that are intelligently delivered and best of all highly readable and comprehensible to the average non-scientist reader. It depicts a world where inhabitants resemble nothing encountered in earth’s experience and yet doesn’t come across as silly but highly credible, exciting and intriguing reality. For any reader who has the slightest interest in science fiction, this is your must read for the year; and for those who have never experienced the “other world vicissitudes of life on other planets,” this is the greatest introduction to the world of science fiction you will ever find! Highly, highly recommended, a truly wonderful work of science fiction that ranks up there with the masters of the genre!

The beginning story slowly evolves to the final ending. I found that I enjoyed the trip and looked forward to journey of the characters. You knew from the start how this must end and saddened that it could end this way. I enjoy this author and would recommend this book.

Just enough suspense to keep you reading. Too light on human emotion but perhaps necessitated by the long time frame. I'll still read the sequel just to see what happens. I'm not a great fan of alternative timeline plots and was glad to see it minimized here -- a heads up to those who are.