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the leading researcher on superluminal travel, Tessa Anita Wendel of the Settlement Adelia. An attractive, sexy man, Crile, who had been assigned originally the job of finding out what was happening on Rotor, now induces Wendel to move to Earth to pursue her research. Although fully aware of each other's motivations, they become lovers. |
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Eventually Wendel, with help, perfects superluminal travel and builds a ship called the Superluminal. Its first Jump, however, comes out wrong until Wendel comes to the conclusion that she must include gravitational effects: in superluminal travel objects repel rather than attract, and the larger the object the greater the repulsion. Eventually, when the Superluminal discovers Nemesis, Rotor, and Erythro, the prokaryote mind works through Marlene to discover the answer to the problems of the Settlements and Nemesis. Earth cannot be evacuated and Erythro used as a way station to the stars because Erythro would have to be terraformed, which would destroy the prokaryote mind. It discovers in the minds of all the humans present the information that ships in superluminal travel are repelled by objects in normal space, and the objects also are repelled in a much lesser degree. By a substantial series of superluminal passes, then, the path of Nemesis through the solar system can be altered sufficiently to save Earth. |
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In an Epilogue, Pitt thinks in fury and desperation about the failure of his experiment to avoid the anarchy, degeneration and short-time thinking of Earth: |
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What would there be now? Galactic empires? All the sins and follies graduated from one world to millions? Every woe and every difficulty horribly magnified? |
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Who would be able to make sense out of a Galaxy, when no one had ever made sense out of a single world? Who would learn to read the trends and foresee the future in a whole Galaxy teeming with humanity? |
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Nemesis had indeed come. |
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Even in an "independent" novel, Asimov could not resist the temptation to weave in his Foundation themes, or, at least, to remind his readers that in the universe, even in the Asimov universe, nothing exists in isolation. |
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In Nemesis Asimov had "placed considerably more emotion than was customary," by which he meant, I suspect, that the action of the novel was driven more by character than by the logic of the ideas. Pitt is motivated by his concept of a better human society, but the others are influenced by love, ambition, uneasiness, or, most of all, by obsession. Marlene, for instance, has an intense desire, against all reason, to visit |
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