There are very few Hard SF writers still in the game, but Baxter must surely be leading the pack. All it takes is a glance at the author’s notes and acknowledgements to see how much research Baxter has put into this book. Ultima basically forgets about the colonisation angle, and instead concerns itself with the inevitable death of the universe. It’s not just in terms of page count that this is a larger book than its predecessor. Again, there are two narrative streams that do not take place concurrently, though thankfully they merge together well before the end of the novel. We start off in a timeline where the Roman empire still reigns over Europe, but pretty soon we’re skipping into other parts of time and space. Whereas Proxima started off as the highly detailed account of humanity’s first efforts at interstellar colonisation, before transitioning into a multiverse story, Ultima is a multiversal narrative through and through. The second (and final) book in the the Proxima series is a very different beast to its predecessor. A timeline in which the Roman empire never fell. Having stepped through the Hatch on Proxima, Yuri Eden and his allies find themselves in a new timeline.
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