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Napier, Bill


Bill Napier

Nemesis


Nemesis
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Whisked away by helicopter from the fury of a Highland blizzard, asteroid expert 
Oliver Webb joins an elite team of astronomers and physicists at a secret 
location in the US, who are working against the clock to save the world from 
destruction. The answer may lie in a long-forgotten 17th-century manuscript, but 
first Webb will have to retrieve the document - and try to stay alive. 

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Fast-paced and action-packed, Nemesis was the debut novel for Bill Napier, 
research astronomer at Armagh University. It's very much a thinking person's 
technothriller, as Napier certainly knows his stuff, although you don't need to 
be a physicist to enjoy the book (I'm certainly not - most of the technicalities 
went straight over my head with an impressive whooshing sound.) 

As well as the furious pace, there is Napier's snappy prose to enjoy. I liked 
his descriptions of things and people - he avoids cliché and has a rather offbeat, 
refreshing way of putting things. He has a knack for creating quirky characters 
(such as Pontiac-driving, nuke-loving Dr. Judy Whaler) and setting them off 
against one another - I particularly relished the no-holds-barred bickering 
between arch-enemies Webb and rival academic Sacheverell. 

Part of the book's appeal, for me, was the mixture of Tom Clancy-esque up-to-
the-minute technology (planes, missiles, the internet) and ancient mystery (in 
the form of a 17th-century astronomical treatise.) There is thus a resemblance 
to such books as Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, but Napier's grasp of science 
is a lot more convincing than Brown's. Conspiracy theorists will also enjoy 
Nemesis (although I won't say more, as I don't want to give away the plot.) 

There are some sections of the book that are set in 17th Italy, where minor 
astronomer Vincenzo Vincenzi faces trial by the dreaded Inquisition, and here I 
felt a few things sounded a little anachronistic. Would people in the 1600s sit 
on a "sofa" or munch on a "sandwich"? Well, maybe they might - the word "sofa" 
comes from the Arabic "suffa" and would have existed then; the "sandwich" was 
invented (or popularised, depending on your viewpoint) by John Montagu, the 
Fourth Earl of Sandwich, during the following century, but some similar 
combination of bread and meat would probably have existed earlier. The words 
just seemed a bit incongruous in that context. 

There are a few other places where the author was perhaps a little careless. 
Webb is fleeing through the Italian countryside at Christmas-time, when he can 
smell the scent of honeysuckle filling the air. In the middle of winter? I 
think not, unless Italy is a lot balmier than I had thought. 

But these are minor nits indeed. If you, like me, enjoy thrills and spills with 
a dash of authentic science, you will devour Nemesis with the speed of a 
bolide travelling at terminal velocity. And if you, like me, take the asteroid 
threat to our civilisation seriously, then you may welcome a work of fiction 
that serves to draw attention to this very real menace. 

© Alex Cull, 24th February 2006


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