Authors: Stephen Baxter
Could Per Ardua exist? At the time of writing no planet of Proxima has been detected, but a careful inspection of the star’s apparent movements has put upper limits on the sizes of any
possible planets (for a technical paper see Zechmeister, M., Kürster, M., Endl, M., ‘The M Dwarf Planet Search Programme at the ESO VLT+UVES: A Search for Terrestrial Planets in the
Habitable Zone of M Dwarfs’,
Astron. Astrophys
., vol. 505, pp. 859–71, 2009). The planetary system I have invented for this novel fits these limits. Proxima is a red dwarf
– an ‘M dwarf’. We used to think that only sunlike stars could host Earthlike worlds. Now we suspect that M dwarfs like Proxima could after all host habitable worlds (see ‘A
Reappraisal of the Habitability of Planets Around M Dwarf Stars’, J. Tarter et al.,
Astrobiology
, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 30–65, 2007).
The idea of starships driven by very lightweight ‘smart sails’ pushed by microwave beams was suggested by Robert Forward (‘Starwisp: An Ultralight Interstellar Probe’,
Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets
, vol. 22, pp. 345–50, 1985) and revisited by Geoffrey A. Landis (‘Microwave Pushed Interstellar Sail: Starwisp Revisited’, paper
AIAA-2000-3337, presented at the AIAA 36th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Huntsville AL, July 17–19, 2000). I have extrapolated wildly beyond these respectable works.
The classic work
Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience
, ed. Ben Finney and Eric Jones (Berkeley, 1985), contains much speculation on the anthropology and ethics of the
colonisation of space.
I’m deeply grateful to Professor Adam Roberts for a brief injection of Latin.
Any errors or inaccuracies are, of course, my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
December 2012
ALSO BY STEPHEN BAXTER FROM GOLLANCZ:
Non-fiction
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
Fiction
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Northland
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
The Web
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
Destiny’s Children
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent
A Time Odyssey
(with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
Time’s Tapestry
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2013
All rights reserved
The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11686 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.