Galaxias

By: Stephen Baxter

Narrated by: Remmie Milner

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?

New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.

But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze.

Earth begins to fall out of its orbit.

The end is nigh.

Someone has sent us a sign.

©2021 Stephen Baxter (P)2021 Gollancz

Not a bad idea for a story.

The story's premise is a good one although it seemed to me that more time was spent on touchy feely interactions than any substantial scientific story. Also, it was difficult to tell which character was talking at any given time since one of the characters name sounded to like the pronoun 'she' and the narrator had no variance in the voices. I would probably get a refund except that the idea behind the book was a good one.

Voice acting has a single major flaw

I would love to at least give the narrator five stars, but her awful US Southern accent is frankly unforgivable. Some British voice actors seem to care enough to learn how to deliver consistent and believable US regional accents. But this is not one of them. ls that character from Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia, NOLA? Sussex? (Why not? It is southern, after all.)

The story itself offers insufficient meat to hang on its bones. Too many meetings, not enough oomph. I kept expecting something to happen, but it just ended with no real denouement. Meh

Good but with a lacklustre finish

It was good, and I enjoyed most of it, but I felt the ending was a little flat like there had been this big buildup and then blah and being a bit of a Sinophile having lived and worked in China for over 25 years. I felt that there was a glaring mistake as to how the Chinese characters were written. And it was one that you keep getting reminded about every time they mentioned Wu Yan and that’s that in Chinese culture, A Wife doesn’t take her husband‘s name while the children do. A Chinese character isn’t going to share the same family name with the mother unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance, but that wasn’t mentioned in the book unless I missed it. Otherwise it was pretty well thought out suspenseful in its own way and enjoyable just until the last bit

This is what I've been waiting for?

This is a disappointment. I've enjoyed Stephen Baxter in the past. The time Odyssey stuff with Arthur C Clarke's were impressive and I was kind of hoping for lightning to strike twice. This story religious logs and drags on. I kept waiting for the climax and it just feels like it never comes. Also the choice of narrator was ill-advised. I'm sure she's fine and some other context but here she is just so banal and uninteresting. Monotone. She's like the female Wil Wheaton. I feel like she was hired for her identity and not her actual skill. And it's painful what a disappointment wasted a credit on this after waiting months in anticipation.

Bureaucratic scifi with monotonous narrator

Don't be fooled by the cool premise or opening chapters, or even its 2021 covid era relevancy. This is BORING scifi, with a primary pov of someone whose sole plot function seems to be to sit in government or tech meetings and ask stupid questions. Maybe 10% of the book was actually interesting when we get out of the tedious bureaucratic life to see glimpses of the long global implications of the novel's initial event that sets everything else in motion. ("Everything else" = endless in-novel lectures and mind numbing think tank [generously] discussion.) All this read in a calm monotonous tone by someone with a lovely voice but zero effort at characterization or delineating characters for the listener. This is even more confusing because one of the main character's names (Xi?) sounds exactly like "she" and the narrator uses the same voice modulation for every character except for one inexplicable and laughable texan drawl lol. Characters make dumb choices and repeat obvious facts and treat everything like it's a grade school guest lecture. Pinnacle of stupidity (and a major plot climax? maybe? hard to tell with this tps reports level snoozer) is the whole episode with a secret service guard and a top secret science meeting with a foreign spy -- made me want to bang my head against a wall. Stuck it out just to see if there was a big bang of a payoff but no. It ends with a jump cut and a whimper. Yawn. I would love to know exactly what inspired the author to write a cool potentially apocalyptic story from an inert steno pads view. Because that's what listening to this novel felt like.

Disappointed

This is my first Stephan Baxter book. Might be my last. Such good ideas ruined with mundane political nonsense. I was sure it was going to pick up. Never did.

Disappointing because I've loved his other stuff

It starts out ok but quickly becomes a weird slog that isn't sci-fi anymore.

I fully loved the Time Odyssey series and the Proxima/Ultima series and was really disappointed.

Worst Baxter so far

..that I’ve read or listened to.

Interesting premise but it only gets worse after the initial chapters.
Not sure what happened to his storytelling but it’s not on a level as with his previous novels.

Disappointing Book & Narrator

The story has an interesting concept but the execution is, unfortunately, not very good. The story moves at a glacial pace with forgettable characters. Worse, a lot of concepts and situations get reiterated over and over again.

The narrator is adequate but does not provide any voices for the characters, except for a minor character that appears late in the story. Inexplicably the British narrator does a full character voice in a Texan drawl for this one character and ignores everyone else.

Horrible narrator

The Narrator has no range. All the male characters sound like women. This distracts from the richness of the storyline which is quite good. In fact the storyline is one of the best I’ve ever heard but it’s really diminished by poor narration.