The Book Depository Proxima by Stephen Baxter
1386 ratings
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Price: £10.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Proxima : Paperback : Orion Publishing Co : 9780575116856 : : 09 Oct 2014 : An awe-inspiring Planetary Romance from Terry Pratchett's co-author on the Long Earth Books. The Book Depository Proxima by Stephen Baxter - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780575116856
MPN: 9780575116856
GTIN: 9780575116856
Author: Techno Hippy
Rating: 5
Review: 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!
Author: Chris Massey
Rating: 3
Review: A fascinating, tantalising story thay explores what interstellar space life could be like... that unfortunately ends in a bizarre way. Kind of feels like the writer couldn't work out what the ending should be so asked a child.
