The Age of the Centaurs: A future for humankind on Proxima B

November 2, 2016
author |
Andre Rousseau
year published |
2016

A million years into the future, Humans are a distant memory kept in the data banks of the Machines they sent to colonize the Proxima Centauri system before they disappeared from Earth, back in the twenty-fifth century.

Yet some of their DNA survives, thanks to the very same technologies that Humans battled with on Earth. These descendants of Humans have reached a stable equilibrium between their peculiar two-level hybrid society, their new planet’s finicky ecology, and the Machines that provide the material infrastructure they require.

The Centaur species has been around for nearly a million years – almost as long as their creators, the extinct Humans, have been gone. But why has the Centaur species survived so long when their creator species seems not to have survived more than 100,000 years? Centaurs, after all, are very much like Humans.

Through the apprenticeship of the Centaur Husker, we will learn about Orelian society’s organization and values, as it has developed on Proxima B, the closest planet to Earth with liquid water. The character traits of the Centaur species are similar to those of Humans, yet in some respects, they differ vastly. As readers follow Husker’s reactions to these differences, they may be forced to re-examine some established myths and biases.

—Publisher