Proxima: Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Kyle McCarley
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By:
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Stephen Baxter
About this listen
The very far future: The galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, and chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence, each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light.
The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction) - the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The "substellar point", with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the "antistellar point" on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world? Yuri Jones, with a thousand others, is about to find out.
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Humankind has escaped a dying Earth and set out to find a new home among the stars aboard an immense generation ship affectionately named the Ark. Bryan Benson is the Ark's greatest living sports hero, enjoying retirement working as a detective in Avalon, his home module. The hours are good, the work is easy, and the perks can't be beat. But when a crew member goes missing, Bryan is thrust into the center of an ever-expanding web of deception, secrets, and violence.
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Nearly there
- By Michaela on 05-11-16
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Up Against It
- By: M. J. Locke
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes.
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Very old school SF, in ways good and bad
- By A reader on 06-19-12
By: M. J. Locke
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In the Ocean of Night
- Galactic Center, Book 1
- By: Gregory Benford
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….
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Like some Space with your Soaps?
- By Bradley on 05-15-12
By: Gregory Benford
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Eon
- By: Greg Bear
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but the arrival of the 300-kilometer long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge.
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Am Epic Original SciFi Read Worth Your Time...
- By Michael on 07-01-12
By: Greg Bear
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Semper Mars
- Book One of the Heritage Trilogy
- By: Ian Douglas
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The Year is 2040. The Marines have landed on Mars to guard the unearthed secrets of an ancient and dangerous alien race: Ourselves. Scientists have discovered something astonishing in the subterranean ruins of a sprawling Martian city: startling evidence of an alternative history that threatens to split humanity into opposing factions and plunge the Earth into chaos and war.
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GOT SH@T UP HIS CHAMBER
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-15-17
By: Ian Douglas
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Prador Moon
- A Novel of the Polity, Book 1
- By: Neal Asher
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.
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Narration Terrible; Prador’s Moon has Big Ideas and Epic Scale
- By For_the_Love_of_Books on 08-09-18
By: Neal Asher
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Veiled Alliances
- A Prequel Novella to the Saga of Seven Suns
- By: Kevin J. Anderson
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook shows the origin of the green priests on Theroc, the first Roamer skymining operations on a gas-giant planet, the discovery of the Klikiss robots entombed in an abandoned alien city, the initial Ildiran expedition to Earth, the rescue of the generation ship Burton and the tragedy that leads to sinister breeding experiments. Veiled Alliances is an excellent starting point for readers new to the Saga, as well as an unforgettable adventure for fans of the series.
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Start with Book One
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-05-14
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Expendable
- League of Peoples, Book 1
- By: James Alan Gardner
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Under the benevolent leadership of the League of Peoples, there is no war, little crime, and life is sacred...unless you're an Explorer. The ugly, the flawed, the misfit, the deformed, they are the unwanted, flung to the farthest corners of the galaxy to investigate hostile planets and strange, vicious creatures. Out there, there are a thousand different - and terrible - ways to die.
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FU@@ING EXPLORERS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 03-06-15
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Starfire
- By: B.V. Larson
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On June 30, 1908, an object fell from the sky, releasing more energy than a thousand Hiroshima bombs. A Siberian forest was flattened, but the strike left no significant crater. The anomaly came to be known as the Tunguska Event, and scientists have never agreed whether it was the largest meteor strike in recorded history - or something else. Alien artifacts have been uncovered since the 1908 event, and a new star drive is discovered.
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Het
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-09-17
By: B.V. Larson
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Painfully mediocre
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Not Baxter's best but worth a listen
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In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns...By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps.
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Kinda wraps up Manifold...
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Includes books one and two in the Sleeping Gods series: Endeavor and Erebus.
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I expected better from these two
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Not a bad idea for a story.
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A mysterious object threatens to destroy our solar system. The survival of humankind is at risk, but nobody takes the warning of young astrophysicist Maribel Pedreira seriously. At the same time, an exiled crew of outcasts mines for rare minerals on a lone asteroid. When other scientists finally acknowledge Pedreira's alarming discovery, it becomes clear that these outcasts are the only ones who may be able to save our world, knowing that the Hole hurtles inexorably toward the sun.
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Just OK. Won't repeat it. Won't do more this auth.
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Light Chaser
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Amahle is a Light Chaser—one of a number of explorers, who travel the universe alone (except for their onboard AI), trading trinkets for life stories. But when she listens to the stories sent down through the ages, she hears the same voice talking directly to her from different times and on different worlds. She comes to understand that something terrible is happening, and only she is in a position to do anything about it. And it will cost everything to put it right.
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Life is lonely with only Instagram collars
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Century Rain
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Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archaeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-twentieth-century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber.
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One of John Lee's best performances
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The Quantum Magician
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Belisarius is a quantum man, an engineered Homo quantus who fled the powerful insight of dangerously addictive quantum senses. He found a precarious balance as a con man, but when a client offers him untold wealth to move a squadron of warships across an enemy wormhole, he must embrace his birthright to even try. In fact, the job is so big that he'll need a crew built from all the new sub-branches of humanity. If he succeeds, he might trigger an interstellar war, but success might also point the way to the next step of Homo quantus evolution.
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Just when I had given up.... jack pot!
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Fortress Sol
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When Rab was a baby, his mother made a decision which would change his life. She feared he would be sent to work in the hellish mines of Mercury, to eke out his life until he was worn out, all in the name of maintaining the defense of the Solar System. But when her desperate attempt to flee with her 2 year old failed, she took a desperate step to save him. She cut off his hand. Decades later, Rab has been spared the physical hardships he can no longer endure, and is now based on the Mask, the all-encompassing structure which hides the Solar System from alien eyes.
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Singularity Sky
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Gonzo giggleworthy geekitude
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The year is 2380. The Intersolar Commonwealth, a sphere of stars some 400 light-years in diameter, contains more than 600 worlds, interconnected by a web of transport "tunnels" known as wormholes. At the farthest edge of the Commonwealth, astronomer Dudley Bose observes the impossible: Over 1,000 light-years away, a star...vanishes. It does not go supernova. It does not collapse into a black hole. It simply disappears.
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Great Epic Scifi
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3zekiel
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Deep within the Congo, a team of scientists prepares for the greatest event in the history of humanity, making first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species. Only the jungle is no place for doubts. Could first contact be our last?
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avoid this book
- By Ralf Månsson on 07-19-22
By: Peter Cawdron
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Needle in a Timestack
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Needle in a Timestack is Robert Silverberg at his very best - intelligent, inventive, and visionary. This collection showcases his talent for thought-provoking science fiction, ranging in themes from time travel to space travel, the media to mortality. In the titular story - under development as a feature film by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley - a jealous ex-husband warps time in a vindictive attempt to destroy his former wife's new marriage. Thirty-one identical sons have a shocking surprise for their mother in "There Was an Old Woman".
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Meh
- By JonDC70 on 07-19-20
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The Wrong Stars
- By: Tim Pratt
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The shady crew of the White Raven run freight and salvage at the fringes of our solar system. They discover the wreck of a centuries-old exploration vessel floating light years away from its intended destination and revive its sole occupant, who wakes with news of First Alien Contact. When the crew break it to her that humanity has alien allies already, she reveals that these are very different extra-terrestrials and the gifts they bestowed on her could kill all humanity, or take it out to the most distant stars.
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Save yourself a credit, read something else
- By Ian Thomas Healy on 09-19-18
By: Tim Pratt
What listeners say about Proxima: Book 1
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kelly
- 10-13-15
Bland
I love SciFi, but nothing about this book snatched my attention. Maybe the next book in the series will grab me and this book was just a precursor.
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- M
- 02-04-17
complex and cohesive
complex and cohesive, I loved the long time scale of the story and interstellar scope.
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- Kenn Brody
- 04-05-24
Baxter is the SF master.
World building, character arcs, cosmic themes, and writing style make this another 5 star novel. The narration was excellent.
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- Greyflood
- 12-04-14
Baxter's Best
What an incredible journey this book is. It's not at all what I was expecting it to be when I started it. It is, I think, Baxter's finest book yet in a career of incredible hard sci fi adventures.
I have been reading Baxter for about 15 years, starting with his Xeelee sequence, and have been a fan ever since. I felt some of his more recent work, like the Long Earth trilogy, were vastly inferior to what he'd done in the past, and others, like the Flood/Ark duology, were so mind-numbingly depressing as to be almost not worth reading. But Proxima is just what I needed from Baxter: a perfect blend of hard sci fi adventure and discovery, with the undertones of vast cosmic machinations you'd expect from vintage Baxter works.
The story has a rich palette of characters, more than any I can remember in any of his recent works. Baxter has been criticized for having very limited characterization, which I think is a somewhat fair assessment, but this book featured a host of distinct, three-dimensional characters with very different perspectives, motivations, and backgrounds. The main character is Yuri Eden, a man sent on a one-way trip to Proxima, the nearest star to our solar system, along with a crew of rag-tag ne'er-do-wells, to colonize the planet in preparation for future human expansion. Think the British colonization of Australia with convicts, only in space. Things...don't go smoothly as you might expect.
From this point, Baxter launches into a deeply complex bit of world-building, creating an interplanetary human society in the twenty-second century, which has survived the calamitous "jolts" of climate change and are faced with a cold war between the two economic superpowers of the time, the U.N. and China. Realistic physics and space travel mechanics abound, as usual for Baxter. On Proxima itself, Baxter imagines a rich world where life evolved very differently from on Earth, but also more similarly than it ought to have. Mysteries build upon mysteries as the colonists of Prox seek to survive and cope with their situation, while back in the solar system, shocking discoveries are made on Mercury.
The story kept me in suspense most of its run time. Baxter has greatly evolved his craft of storytelling. He avoids cliches deftly and brings one unexpected twist after another with each chapter. You'll never believe where things ultimately end up by the book's end. And underneath all the human drama is the looming presence of something far greater and far more disturbing. Events on Prox, and in the solar system, haven't happened by chance. What it all means is not resolved by the end of the novel. Rather, it ends on multiple cliffhangers with only a glimmer of the vaster things to come. This is the first book in a series of at least two, so don't go into it expecting everything to get wrapped up. Nevertheless, you will find yourself unable to stop listening as the plot drives further and further toward its conclusion. I cannot wait for book two, Ultima.
If you're a fan of Baxter, this is a no-brainer to get. It's his best work in years, and shows his evolution as a writer, thinker, and story-teller. If you're new to Baxter, you could hardly ask for a more accessible, exciting, and relevant hard sci fi novel to start on. It's easily the best sci fi book I've read this year, and perhaps in the last several.
The narrator is fantastic. His native accent is British, but he can do thoroughly convincing American and Australian accents effortlessly. His Hisapnic accents aren't quite as polished, but they're also not as frequent. His reading of the material was perfect: serious, sometimes grave, with excellent inflection and diction. I loved his performance and will be looking forward to hearing him again on other books, especially the next book in this series, I sincerely hope.
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15 people found this helpful
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- SciFi Kindle
- 01-29-15
Wins on both concepts AND character levels
This well-structured space opera manages to deliver both a engaging character-driven drama as well as some jaw-dropping wonders of an alien BDO (Big Dumb Object). Baxter tells a multi-narrative story from various character perspectives over a lifetime, and divides the action across two star systems.
One protagonist, a press-ganged colonist named Yuri Eden, is dragged across interstellar space to be abandoned on a hostile new world to establish a human foothold along with a scattering of other unwilling exiles. Their story of survival over several decades brutally demonstrates both the dangers of human psychological isolation as well as an unfamiliar and alien environment. There is some interesting and exotic biota, although he keeps it to only three or four varieties, which I was engaged enough to have wanted more. A good deal of research and calculation must have gone into determining what the conditions of such a world must be, and Baxter goes into convincing depth of detail describing weather, geology, etc.
Where I thought the story really shined, however, was in the other main narrative back on the Earth, where a catastrophic conflict is brewing between two power blocks. A physicist named Stephanie Kalinski finds herself caught in between the two as the alien artifacts she’s spent her career studying become the central prize that they are contesting. Neither the miracle alien power source nor the alien wormhole gateway are all that unique in SF literature, but Baxter introduces an unexpected twist when Stephanie’s first encounter with one of the artifacts generates a full-grown twin sister, complete with an altered history and memory of this new character for all but Steph herself, who alone recalls her sister-less past timeline. This mid-story twist came quite unexpected, and is among the many teased mysteries left for the subsequent series installment(s) to further address.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Anthony Drouin
- 01-28-21
Engaging and couldn’t stop listening
This is my first audio book and it was a little hard to get used to it. But once I did, I couldn’t stop, I had to know how this ended. The story is gripping and the science is exciting. My only gripes are: it skips ahead in time a little too much and the relationships between the primary characters are a bit lackluster. Otherwise a very fun read.
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- Matt C
- 12-02-15
Great book!
Great book! If you liked Spin or The Long Earth, I think you will like this.
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- M. G. Clausen
- 09-02-16
Gripping, pulls you along
The ending felt like an unexpected traverse into a different genre of Sci Fi, but lovely otherwise. Baxter nicely opened my imagination with multiple types of characters that could exist in the future, while tying the plot together well enough that it didn't feel like a forced data dump of ideas. The performance is excellent.
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- Lisa Davidson
- 04-24-16
No Sense of Conclusion
Even a series novel should be able to stand alone on its own merits. This book left way too many people, themes, and plot twists hanging. After giving the story more than 17 hours of my life, I experienced a dramatic let-down. I feel disappointed for getting involved in the first place. Just as the characters betrayed each other, the entire story betrays the reader with an unworthy ending. It ran out of fuel--and I don't know if I want to put this much energy into book two.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Winston
- 03-18-16
Very good first in a series
Any additional comments?
I liked the story though it did seem to skip an explanation or two. Hope the second book is at least as good. I had a very hard time remembering that is was daylight ALL the time. I can't imagine that....
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1 person found this helpful