Proxima by Stephen Baxter
How would you survive on a planet that doesn't spin?
An awe-inspiring Planetary Romance from Terry Pratchett's co-author on the Long Earth Books
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?
Yuri Jones, with 1,000 others, is about to find out ...
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.
Readers love Proxima:
'The plot was very interesting and I really liked how the narrative alternated from the past to the future to give a better understanding of the setting . . . a thought provoking and compelling read' Goodreads reviewer,
'Some damn fine science fiction . . . There's a strong blend of characters here, including human and AI' Goodreads reviewer,
'I highly recommend it for fans of hard sci-fi, time dilation, space exploration, colonisation and first contact . . . Baxter has gone to a lot of bother to do his scientific, ecological research to serve you an entire planet on a platter' Goodreads reviewer,
'Half hard sci-fi about surviving on a new planet, half an almost-2001 sense of mysterious alien force. It all comes together really well' Goodreads reviewer,