Proxima

Een kat in een zak. Een kat in een verdomde zak. Kijk, dit is de blurb van het boek:

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...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.

Eden

damned

I ended up really enjoying it. Many parallels between this and his work with Terry Pratchett.

I often describe the arrival of a newborn or the death of a loved one as like the shock of being ripped out of this universe and slammed unceremoniously into a new one where you're expected to understand how it all works now.

This whole series describes that sensation in great detail.

If I had not bought that at full price I would have DNFed it.

This is neither character driven nor plot driven, this is world building driven.
If you are fine with that, you get a beautifully drawn alien world with lots of unique things but the plot is thin at best. While the description of the earth and how we got here is lacking, the alien world is fantastic.
Baxter's ideas are, as always, grandios, interesting and though provoking but the execution is so poor in this one.
The story only really starts at around 45%, the first half of the book is basically pointless filler with story lines that go nowhere and are never picked up again. Maybe those are for book 2, idk, I am not gonna read it.
It gets interesting in the second part of the book but that too is drawn out only to end at a cliffhanger, which was infuriating to say the least.
It put me off so much that this will be the last Baxter book I will read for some time.

Oh and the book has nothing to do with the text on its back. Literally nothing.

Disclaimer: I ‘read' this on audible, if that is of importance.