Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

 

Humans have spread to other habitats in the solar system, but not enough to prevent Earth from being overpopulated and poor.  Scientific research on Earth is limited by those issues.  Research is doing somewhat better in the space habitats and the first steps to using an interstellar drive are being made.

 

The man running the Rotor space habitat, which is working on the interstellar drive, wants to create a human society isolated from the rest of humanity in order to develop a unique society.  When one of his astronomers tells him she has discovered a star (“Nemesis”) only 2 light years from Earth (previously unnoticed because it is obscured behind a dust cloud), he decides this hidden nearby star is the place for his isolated society.  When he is told that Nemesis is moving towards the solar system and in 5000 years it is likely to cause Earth to become uninhabitable, he convinces the astronomer to keep it quiet long enough for the new society to be established.

 

The astronomer's daughter has an incredible ability to read body language and otherwise tell who is telling the truth and figure out what others are thinking.  A while after Rotor arrives at the other star, the daughter is drawn to the planet there.

 

The planet’s native life is single-celled organisms.  It has not seemed very interesting to scientists.  When the astronomer and her daughter move from the orbiting space habitat to the planet surface, the daughter becomes convinced that she has been contacted by an alien mind – presumably based on the native organisms.

 

When Rotor left the solar system, nobody knew where it went.  However, it did become clear it used a new kind of drive.  As others on Earth try to get clues about how the new drive works and where Rotor went, they come across data on the other star.  They realize Nemesis is likely to make it necessary to evacuate Earth’s entire population within the next few thousand years.  It seems clear this was known on Rotor and it had been decided not to tell Earth.  When Earth’s first starship is built, its first mission to fly to Nemesis and confront the other society over this issue.

 

 

Science notes

 

I tend to be sensitive to the inclusion of "mind powers" and the like in SF.  After decades of parapsychology research, we lack real evidence of telepathic abilities between any humans.  It's very unlikely that two humans that have a common evolutionary heritage and biological structures, and who speak the same language can communicate mind-to-mind (at least without being artificially enhanced by future science).  It seems even more unlikely that a human could have successful mind-to-mind communications with a life-form from an entirely separate evolutionary tradition, with different biological structures and with no common language.  Yet this is a significant thread in Nemesis.  Not only are we to believe that such communication could take place, the reader is expected to believe that the other life-form could identify one particular individual human who had a greater potential for this communication and the other life-form could make this identification while it was on the planet's surface and the human was in orbit inside the space habitat.

 

 

 

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