Nemesis by Isaac Asimov (1989, 386 pages) – Sometimes I forget that the Grand Master did more than give us social psychologists predicting the far future and robots finding themselves. He was also a wizard at creating characters you really care about.
In this science fiction novel, independent from all his others, we see the colonization of an unknown nearby sun, appropriately called Nemesis, through the eyes of a family. The mother, a driven scientist from one of the orbiting Earth settlements who discovers Nemesis, the husband from over-populated Earth, and their daughter, a remarkable young woman growing up on Rotor, a colony that left Earth’s solar system to circle an arid world around a gas giant around Nemesis.
The wife, the epitome of an obsessed scientist, forces her husband to return to Earth when she takes the baby when Rotor travels to Nemesis using hyper spatial transportation. On the orbiting colony, the plain daughter, Marlene (who pronounces all three syllables) is fifteen, and she displays an uncanny ability to read everyone’s body language. Using it as a threat to the Commissioner of Rotor, she insists she and her mother be assigned to the small science dome on the desert planet because it seems to be calling her.
The self-serving Commissioner quickly agrees, pleased to be rid of the unnerving teenager and her bothersome mother. People who are a little different tend to go mad on the planet’s surface, and he hopes she’ll join those ranks.
Meanwhile, Dad helps convince another colony’s top scientist to come to Earth and work on subliminal space warp technology so he can go to Nemesis and claim his daughter (whom he hasn’t seen since she was one). They become romantically involved and work together to find Nemesis. Earth is desperate to find this hidden sun because it appears to be coming toward Earth and will make Earth uninhabitable in five thousand years.
Of course, this being Asimov, there’s lots of science techno-babble (most of which may be educational and true but is easily skimmable). This isn’t a tale about gravitational inverses and time displacements; this is a tale about people trying to survive, not always in a noble way. The Commissioner fears Earth will appear and take over his little kingdom. Earth is afraid Nemesis, although a red dwarf, may have the only habitable planet they can reach in time.
Mom hates Dad for leaving when she told him to, Dad never thinks of Mom because he’s in a new relationship and fixated on Marlene. Marlene is obsessed with the planet and discovers the single-celled organisms on the desert world actually make up a brain and don’t want Rotorians or Earthlings settling there.
Asimov always writes interesting characters, but they are usually secondary to the amazing science fiction. In this book, the characters, their relationships, and their motivations are primary to the story. I kind of liked that.
Well done, Mr. Asimov.
