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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dangerous Science,
By
This review is from: Nemesis (Mass Market Paperback)
Author Bill Napier's first novel, NEMESIS, features a Scottish astronomer, Dr. Oliver Webb, who is racing against time to find an earth-crossing asteroid that has been deflected by a foreign power to strike and completely destroy North America. After one of Webb's colleagues dies in an unlikely accident, he discovers that the key to the asteroid's identity is cryptically concealed in a 17th century astronomical manuscript penned by a Catholic monk who was accused of heresy. A surprise ending highlights this action-packed thriller. If you like James Rollins' ICE HUNT or Matthew Reilly's CONTEST, then you'll like NEMESIS.
Dr. Bill Napier is an astronomer at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. He specializes in assessing the hazards of interplanetary comets and asteroids colliding with Earth and has co-authored three non-fiction astronomy books. He was one of the first astronomers to recognize the risk of collisions with extra-terrestrial objects and proposed that these may have been the cause of pre-historical catastrophes. Other novels by Dr. Napier are THE LURE, REVELATION, SHATTERED ICON, and SPLINTERED ICON. There were many action sequences where the hero, Dr. Webb, has to overcome the odds to just to stay alive, much less solve the puzzle of the killer asteroid. The science that comes out in the novel is authentic and gives some insight into how astronomers learn about the heavens and plot the courses of objects in space. The historical chapters also provide realistic depth to an already interesting story line. Just as you think that the end is near, for the book and the Earth, there is a twist that brings on more action and holds you to the end. A couple of times in the novel there were errant paragraphs that didn't seem to follow the story at that instant. This was somewhat confusing, and afterward the action picked right back up where it left off. Also, for the poor American yank, there were certain terms that were purely British or Irish with no explanation of what they meant. These were minor issues and didn't reduce my enjoyment of the book. If you enjoy action-packed stories with a bent to science and history, then you should read NEMESIS.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unbelievable (in the worst sense of the word),
By
This review is from: Nemesis (Mass Market Paperback)
Nemesis opens with a team of American and European scientists hastily gathered together to foil a Russian plot to decimate the United States using a redirected asteroid.
The scientists are told that they must discover which asteroid is going to hit us and where it is within the next five days. If they fail, the United States will preemptively launch a nuclear first strike against Russia, China and all of the former Soviet states. So what's the problem with this book? Let me count the ways. One: You spend the first half of the book wondering "How do we know that there's this mystery asteroid that floating around out there with our name on it?" Eventually the author does get around to telling us how the US government uncovered this Russian plan. Let's just say it involves a (faked) manned Russian mission to Mars and a cosmonaut singing in the background. Oh, did I mention the averted White House coup? Plus, it just doesn't work when the author starts throwing around computer terms (FTP, Linux, firewall, etc) to make the hero sound like he's some kind of l33t tech guy. Sorry, I'm not buying it. I think a bright elementary school kid could probably write a more believable and entertaining story...
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
OK thriller, good way to relax for a few hours,
By
This review is from: Nemesis (Mass Market Paperback)
Good story, nice plot twists, but you have to take a bit of a gulp to swallow the basic premise: sometime in the fairly near future, Russia has been re-energized as a threat to the West: it's back to the Cold War days under a hyper-aggressive leader, and US intelligence reports that they have nudged an asteroid's course to crash into America. Oh, those bad Russkies- should we nuke 'em? Problem for the emergency team trying to handle the situation is that the asteroid has not been identified, and there's an awful lot of them out there...and when it is identified, how do you stop it? ("Armageddon" anyone? The book is copyright 1998 and the movie was also 1998, but there doesn't seem to be a connection.) There's a neat twist involving a late medieval manuscript with a "heretic's" observations of stars..and perhaps an asteroid's orbit...and what happened to him. I almost agree with another reviewer who found this the best part of the book! The story of Vicenzo and the cardinals is very well done.
It's worth a read - taut writing and plenty of complex action, double-deceptions everywhere. Lots of astronomy expertise (that is Bill Napier's background) and reasonable forward-guessing about what computers would be like in his future time: he missed out on CDs replacing floppy disks, but was correct about the increased use of Linux. There are some sloppy errors - the Piper Tomahawk, like most light aircraft, is controlled by a yoke not a joystick: one-way encoding cannot be decrypted by using a key (though his second reference has it right). In the US you don't take an elevator to the first floor, someone landing a helicopter at a private house would not ask if the "back garden" was clear (why would he land in the vegetable patch?), I don't think any house in the US uses "electric fires" for heating. And no American president would be likely to make a comparison to Drake and the Spanish Armada....Then there are the purely British internal references which would mean nothing to the US reader: I don't count these as mistakes, just a consequence of the author's background: Henley, Triffids, Brand's Hatch, and of course the old favorites - cars have boots and bonnets instead of trunks and hoods. So long as it isn't American characters using the terms, these just add an interesting air of oddity. But since so most of the action is set in the US, it might have been worth preparing an Americanized text (not that we really have an equivalent to Henley or the Triffids - are they still on UK TV? thought they were long gone).
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