Proxima is Stephen
Baxter’s latest, due next week from Gollancz (£12.99):
“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?
Needle ships fall from Proxima IV's sky. Yuri Jones, with
1000 others, is about to find out.”
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