The novel “Proxima” by Stephen Baxter was published for the first time in 2013. It’s the first book in the Proxima series.

When Yuri is awakened from hibernation, he finds himself in a place and time that’s very different from the one he grew up in. Even worse, when someone finally tells him what’s going on, he finds out that he ended up in a group of people selected for an expedition to a planet in the Proxima Centauri system.

Stephanie “Stef” Kalinski is a scientist who is investigating the mystery of the kernels, objects discovered by humans and exploited as spaceship engines. Through trial and error, it was possible to understand how they work in an empirical way, but nobody knows what they really are and above all the principles that explain why they work. The answers could be on the planet Mercury.