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Page 218
Empire. Prelude to Foundation intimates that the Dune political structure would soon degenerate into barbarism worse than that displayed by the Emperor or the Harkonnens. Prelude . . . tries to rationalize Asimov's vision, that is, by presuming the guiding mind of the near-immortal R. Daneel Olivaw aided by the developing science of psychohistory and then the invention of Gaia.
When Doubleday editor Jennifer Brehl approved Asimov's request to write Prelude to Foundation she also suggested that the novel after that be "an entirely independent product, with a completely new background." On February 3, 1988, Asimov began writing Nemesis. In his memoir he described it as "placed closer to our time than was true of either the robot novels or the Foundation novels. It dealt with the colonization of a satellite that circled a Jovian-type planet that, in turn, circled a red-dwarf star. My protagonist was a teenaged girl and I also had two strong adult women characters. I placed considerably more emotion in the novel than was customary for me."
Nemesis was published in the fall of 1989 "and was very successful." The "Nemesis" of the title was not the star invisible behind the Oort cloud that astrophysicists have speculated might cause perturbations that would lead periodically to new showers of meteorites, one of which, millions of years ago, may have eliminated the dinosaurs. Asimov's "Nemesis" was a similar, nearby star but obscured by a cloud of interstellar dust. It was a Nemesis because its movement through the solar system might destroy Earth.
The concept was as old as Camille Flammarion's La Fin du Monde (1893-94), H.G. Wells's "The Star" (1897), and Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933). But Asimov approached it not as a catastrophe story but as an opportunity story. He also dealt with two aspects of the future that he had seldom, if ever, touched upon before in his fiction: an overcrowded Earth and space habitats. In the process he discussed the inability of space travel to relieve Earth's population problems and the problems of faster-than-light travel, which he names "superluminal," and faster-than-light communication.
The narrative begins in 2236 with flashbacks to 2220, and later, approaching 2236 a device that Asimov felt should be explained to his readers in an "Author's Note," along with the fact that this novel did not belong to the Foundation or robot series. Habitats, called Settlements, have been built in space. They circle Earth and Mars and inhabit the Asteroid belt, but they do not get along much better than Earth and its hungry, violent, alienated, drug-ridden billions.

 
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