Nemesis

Nemesis is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1989, three years before his death.

It is set in a period when interstellar travel is being discovered and made workable, and the story turns on Rotor, a space station colony that has been moved from the vicinity of Earth and put into orbit around the newly found red dwarf Nemesis. The colonists live above Erythro, a semi-habitable moon named for the red light it receives, and they are split over what to do next: go down to the surface, or outward to the asteroid belts of the system.

What none of them know at first is that the bacterial life on Erythro forms a single collective organism with a kind of consciousness and telepathy of its own, and that discovery reorders the argument they have been having about where the colony should go. Back at Earth, meanwhile, faster-than-light travel is finally made to work, which brings to an end the isolation that Rotor was built to enjoy and puts the two civilisations back in touch with each other.