Review: Nemesis

Nemesis by Alex Lamb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(3.5 stars)
A full-on space opera set in the mid-future, a follow-up to the first book in this universe, which I haven’t read, ‘Roboteer’. I think having read the book Roboteer (I haven’t) would help quite a bit with this one, and I haven’t, as the central character Will and a lot of his preoccupations, and the set-up of the interplanetary political situation, all seem to hark back to events in the earlier book a lot.

Pros of this book are the interesting-ish cast of characters, and somewhat plausible plot of skulduggery, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, galaxy-wide realpolitik, and well-sketched vignettes of visiting different planets and flying different ships as the characters are drawntowards the climactic final battles. There’s a lot of action that draws the book along after the central shaping event of the Nemesis attack early in the book.

Remarking on the politics and science futurism:- Lamb treads a balance between Dystopia and techno-topia (of the sort Singularitarians like to ponder) in this book and tries to draw out implications. Like many other anthropocene sci-fi authors, Lamb posits that the Earth’s ecosystem is on a pretty serious downward slide and most of the population are trying to migrate to other planets, despite a few do-gooders efforts to turn things round and even though the Transcended from the previous book supplied limiteless energy … Cyberspace has been highly augmented and particularly the characters Will and his reluctant protege (Mark?) seem to have ubermenschian abilities to hack almost anything almost instantly, and even several other key characters have pretty amazing abilities. As a software engineer myself (and seeing the author is too) this seems pretty implausible without major augmentation and it’s implied this has happened, but not clearly. Maybe that was in the previous book.

Overall a good read – like a review of an earlier book with the same title by Asimov implies – trying to balance an intense mixture of worldbuilding, science ideas, political ideas, character exposition and decent plot and action must be damn tricky. While this book doesn’t achieve what the likes of Iain M Banks at his peak did in this genre (I.E. in Use of Weapons), especially re making the central characters compellingly intersting despite their souped-up abilities, it’s a good attempt.

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