Nemesis (1989)

Isaac Asimov

New York: Bantam Books; ISBN: 0-553-28628-5; Pages: 386.

This is a standalone novel that is not part of any of Asimov's sprawling series. The earth has not been destroyed by radioactivity, there are no humanoid robots, and no Galactic Empires. But there are the Settlements.

In the 23 century, Earth is over-populated (ain't it always) and about 1% of humanity has moved into permanent orbiting stations. How they live there is anyone's guess and I am not talking about recycling and food supply, but about psychology. Asimov is content to drop 60 thousand human beings in extremely limited space and believe that the only problems these people will have is with visiting Earthmen or minorities who somehow do not fit their racial prejudices.

Rotor is one of these settlements and is only important because its scientists have discovered the hyper-assisted flight: a weird mode of transportation that involves a lot of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo but that basically reduces to skipping in and out of "hyperspace" traveling sometimes faster and sometimes slower than the speed of light. What's more, the Rotorian astronomer Insigna has discovered a previously unspotted star at half the distance to Alpha Centauri. This turns out to be the perfect destination for Rotor's idiotic Commissioner who persuades the Settlement to abandon everyone in search of its nirvana (the perennial, and utterly unrealistic, quest to build the perfect world).

Rotor leaves Earth and travels to the red-dwarf star Nemesis, where its people discover a gas giant (uninhabitable) with a satellite the size of Earth (inhabitable). They call the satellite Erythro and then promptly fail to settle it, apparently content to drift around the asteroids and build more settlements. Insigna becomes firmly convinced that Nemesis will pass too close to the Solar System in about 5,000 years, and will move the Earth out of its orbit, making it uninhabitable.

Marlene is Insigna's daughter from the Earthman Crile, who abandoned them when Rotor decided to up and go. He also happens to have been a spy who had been trying to uncover the secret of hyper-assist. Marlene has an uncanny gift: she can read human behavior. That is, she can detect when people are lying and such. Unfortunately, Asimov then stretches this perceptive ability into a deductive one, and so Marlene not only sees what people try to hide, but usually figures out their exact reasons. Such a precocious teenager is more than a minor irritant. Of course, the Commissioner soon tries to get rid of both daughter and mother (because Insigna has been bugging him to do something about the impending destruction of Earth).

Even more implausible are the developments on Earth. There's the perennially sinister man in charge who gets wind of Nemesis and the havoc it will eventually wreak. His reaction? To finance, plan, and organize the most ambitious project Earth has ever witnessed, the development of superluminal (also known as FTL) flight. Objective: find Rotor and blow it out of the sky. WHAT? Yes, the guy is convinced that Rotor wanted to let the entire Solar System go to hell just because the Rotorians are white, perhaps dreaming of rebuilding South Africa. Even it this were so (which it does not seem to have been the case), the idea of revenge is stupid.

But not as stupid as what follows. Crile, the same guy who had seduced the Rotorian astronomer, now seduces another brilliant settler scientist, who gets to Earth and promptly develops FTL flight. He is allowed to tag along on the mission. In the end, Erythro turns out to be inhabited by prokaryotes who, taken together, form one planet-wide intelligent organism, which delights in talking to certain humans. The bad news is that it won't let people colonize the planet and use it as an temporary haven. The good news is that it tells them another way to avoid the problem... which they should have known all along.

While I did read this book in two sittings, in the end it was a disappointment. I can deal with the somewhat annoying continuous shifting of narrative time and space. Asimov tells the story from the Nemesis' present and begins with the Earth's past, slowly converging the two stories toward the timeframe of the first. He also uses cheap tricks by not disclosing what he (the omniscient writer) already knows. For example, he creates ominous cliffhangers (like the Plague) without telling us anything but their ominous status. This sort of story-telling is unfair to the reader who should know as much as the characters, and not as much as the author. So if the characters have no premonitions, neither should we. Of course, Marlene did have some notion, but it was too vague and perhaps not as ominous as Asimov made it look like. In particular, she was also absolutely convinced Erythro would not harm her, so the entire Plague scare was just for our dubious benefit.

It is difficult to get worked up about something that may happen in 5,000 years. I have yet to meet a normal human being would give a hoot. That we will organize a flight program that would last 5 millennia is absurd. I think the more natural solution is to ignore the problem for, say, 4,000 years and then, if we are still around, simply blow up Nemesis (which we may be able to do even with present-day technology) or nudge it slightly off-course. I certainly do not believe that we'd be evacuating everyone. Heck, even if no such solution existed, does anyone actually think that all people are going to be rescued? Didn't think so.

The racial propaganda. Not too subtle. Basically, the Settlements are these hives of racism. They force out everyone who is not up to their standards, but Asimov is clear that this refers to skin color. Ok, maybe we won't learn to see past this in two centuries (I rather hoped that we would), but then the transparent preaching of the virtues of diversity is just boring and insincere. Why exactly is it good/bad to be hetero/homogeneous? Much more than Asimov's vague statements are necessary to justify any of the three possible positions (the third is that this is irrelevant).

The biggest problem with this novel is that none of the characters is even remotely likeable. Marlene is extremely annoying, not just to the people around her but to the reader as well. She knows too much, she is too clever, and she is ugly. A winning combination. If you want to be voted least popular, that is. Her mother is a hysteric and too easily manipulable. Her father is an opportunist who cannot hold a candle to anyone, and only seems important because two women like him for a while. And the list can go on. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to write a good novel with disagreeable characters. This one is no exception.

August 24, 2003