Just Finished Reading Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

One of prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's final novels was Nemesis, which was released in 1989, three years before the author's death in 1992.  Set early in the twenty-third century, Earth is an overpopulated and seriously polluted planet with all sorts of environmental and social problems (no surprise here).  A number of Settlements, as they are called, have gone out into the Solar System...these are large, self-contained systems populated by thousands, many of whom are the product of generations living completely away from the original home world.  Rotor, one such settlement, has perfected the ability to travel at approximately the speed of light and, under the direction of its leader Janus Pitt, who is cynical and contemptuous of Earth, has decided to secretly depart to a hidden star system only recently discovered by one its astronomers, Eugenia Insignia.  She takes along her teenage daughter Marlene...who has the intuitive gift of intimately discerning others' hidden motives through their speech and body language...while sending her estranged husband Criles Fisher (and Marlene's father) back to Earth.  She does not know that Criles had been working as a spy for Earth to discern Rotor's intentions, and he is soon enlisted in the effort first to find the missing Settlement with the aid of the invention of superluminal (faster than the speed of light) travel by his new partner, Tessa Wendel.  Making it all a very urgent matter is the discovery that Nemesis, a red dwarf star only two light-years from Earth, is headed in the Solar System's general direction and, upon its passing, will disturb Earth's gravity enough to move its orbit and make it uninhabitable in just a few thousand years.  Is there a habitable world around Nemesis...and what happened to Rotor?  Young Marlene figures greatly in all of this, and her gift contributes immeasurably to the story's resolution.  Naturally, I'm not the one to spill the beans...you'll have to read it for yourself to find out what happens...

Breaking the light barrier in space travel has been a common theme in much science fiction literature, with it being supposed by many writers that humanity will eventually devise a means to bypass Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which sets an absolute limit on motion at the speed of light.  In reality, good luck with that project...sounds unfeasible to me...but it does open up the universe for stories and speculation.  Other themes that Nemesis incorporates are how to deal with life forms so exotic that they may be completely overlooked at first, as well as how they might communicate with us and see themselves and their environment.  Good stuff to muse upon, and this novel also presents some compelling characters with strong personalities and worldviews.  It also has a great epilogue, expressing the forebodings of Janus Pitt.  I found it to be one of Isaac Asimov's better works, and I've read a lot of them...