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Nemesis | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Isaac Asimov | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
It turns out that Alpha Centauri is not the closest star to our own solar system. That distinction belongs to Nemesis, lying a mere two light years away. It took so long to notice because it is a puny, dim red dwarf that, furthermore, lies behind a dust cloud that dims it still further. But now that we noticed it, early in the twenty-third century, one Settlement, Rotor, has undertaken the two-year journey to the system in order to escape an overcrowded Earth. Now the rest of the stystem is trying to figure out the hyper-assist propulsion that Rotor used to get there. And the situation is escalated when it is discovered that Nemesis is moving towards the sun, and will pass thrugh our system in a mere five thousand years. We have roughly that long to evacuate the planet, eight billion people and growing.
The story is entirely character-driven. Unfortunately, I didn't really like most of the characters. They were not shallow, they were by and large not overly irritating, they were just... dull. The best character is probably the antagonist ("villain" isn't quite appropriate for this story). He is pathologically isolationist and secretive, but it is portrayed in such a way that readers can actually understand and perhaps find themselves agreeing with his logic! I don't agree with him at all, myself, but I could see where he was coming from.
But everyone else is boring.
The main problem is that there is no action. I don't mean ship-to-ship battles a la David Weber or anything - Asimov is not known for space opera - but there's no emotional investment at all in the scenes. The book consists of two sides, the Earth system and the Rotorians, and each has a brilliant scientist as a major character. But instead of depicting each amazing discovery, each brainstorming session that resulted in an advance of knowledge, Asimov instead tells the reader of them by showing the scientists coming home and telling their lovers what they figured out that day. This is boring! Dull! Uninteresting! It might work occasionally, as a relief from actually showing these things as they happen - we don't need to see all of them, after all - but it is the only way it is depicted in the book. It turns this into three hundred plus pages of talking heads. This is true not just regarding those discoveries but pretty much everything.
The main character is a fifteen-year-old girl who has the incredible ability to read people's body language perfectly. She can tell by the slightest twitch of the eyelid or tightening of the lips or the like. At first it was fine, but as the story progressed and the ability seemed to grow it became more and more unbelievable. Not only could she tell you were upset but what about. Further, she occassionally mumbled to herself what she was reading to get her fantastic insights. But this is supposed to be an unconscious talent that she cannot turn off. Do you recite the names of your muscles as you lift your arm? No? Then why does she mumble about pupils narrowing, something that should have been equally instinctual?
Asimov may not be known for action-packed space opera, but he is well known for hard science fiction. This actually hurts the story, in two ways. First, I was unimpressed with the level of technology that the setting had. Asimov stuck too closely to reasonable extrapolations of known science, with the ultimate result that it didn't feel advanced enough to be the year 2230. It was more akin to 2030, actually, or at most 2070 or so. Also, for someone who tries so hard to keep his science non-fictional, I found the depiction of the life form they find in the Nemesis system to be hard to take. While at first the planet seems to be occupied by no more than alien germs, it is eventually discovered that there is quite a bit more to the world than they thought. But what it is I found hard to take, especially in an otherwise hard sci-fi tale.
All in all, this is probably one to be avoided, despite who the author is. Big fans of Asimov may like it, or at least tolerate it, but taken on its own merits I found it distinctly unworthy of my interest.
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