BASIC BOOKS, APRIL 2014Far beyond the range of any telescope humanity will ever possess lies the doomed planet Nemesis. Nemesis, a near-twin to our own world, is named after the ancient Greek goddess responsible for the rebalancing of undeserved good fortune. As befits this name, Nemesis has been on a lucky roll far longer than any world could reasonably expect, but her streak of good fortune has come to an end.
Nemesis is dying. The immense herds that once swarmed across her vast plains are gone forever. The huge beasts that swam her clear, blue ocean waters are now extinct, and the previously verdant rain forests of her equatorial regions have withered and died. A beautiful and complex biosphere has vanished, leaving bacteria and a few species of worm as meager representatives of the multifarious life-forms that once made Nemesis the biological pinnacle of her galaxy.
When Nemesis first formed she was a duplicate of early earth in almost every way. Most of her subsequent history, too, was strikingly similar to that of our own planet. Both of these initially sterile, overheated hellholes transformed into vibrant, microbe-infested globes within a few hundred million years of their ...
