Whether it’s a world where the sun never sets and most life-forms are a weird blend of animal and plant, or powerful AI’s that may or may not have humanity’s best interests in mind, or even attempts to develop a type of soda that will fizz nicely in low-gravity environments, Baxter does the science part of science-fiction with skill and imagination. If you read sci-fi because you like to discover alien worlds and fantastic technologies, if you enjoy imagining a future that seems scientifically plausible, then there is plenty here for you. And don’t forget the moralizing fable about how humanity never learns from its mistakes, like playing Cold War games with incredibly powerful weapons or not caring what happens to the local environment and natives when settling a new land.ĭid you get all of that? No? Then let me take a different tack. Oh, it’s also about an unknown alien intelligence that has sprinkled Mercury and Proxima C with some really useful–and dangerous–bits of technology. I say “ostensibly” because, really, the story is also about tensions between the United Nations, which has control of Mercury and part of Mars, and China, which controls part of Mars and parts of the asteroid belt. Proxima is, ostensibly, about humanity’s first attempts at colonizing a planet in a different solar system.
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