robert forward - dragon's egg

i had finished this novel before going on holidays to romania, but i just couldn’t get around to writing a review at that time. this hard science fiction novel was published in the 80s and is now considered a classic (though perhaps not as popular as clarke’s or asimov’s works).

the story revolves around the accidental discovery of an intelligent alien species living on the surface of a neutron star, with a surface gravity of 67 billion g! as is the case with many hard sci-fi stories of this type, the human characters aren’t very well developed and take a backseat to the aliens and their environment. the author gives a plausible account of what life forms in such a place might look like, with the aliens, called “cheela”, having squashed, flexible bodies, roughly the size of a sesame seed with eyes that see in the ultraviolet and can perceive soft x-rays. even locomotion on the surface of the star is different from what we are used to here on earth, as traveling along the magnetic field lines (towards a pole) is easier than across the field lines. the cheela also perceive time differently, with one day, that is a revolution of the neutron star, taking about 0.2 seconds and the entire technological development of their civilization, from the invention of agriculture to gravity manipulation and spaceflight, happening in roughly one earth month. all these aspects, and many others, make the interaction between the humans and the cheela very interesting (even the method of mitigating the tidal forces to approach the neutron star is quite innovative).

robert forward was a physicist and he wrote his doctoral thesis on the detection of gravitational waves (though he later had a career as an aerospace engineer), so the science pertaining to the neutron star is spot-on (at least for the 80s). the history of how this novel came to exist is also interesting: forward agreed to write it together with larry niven, but the latter got involved in co-authoring another novel, “lucifer’s hammer” with jerry pournelle. so forward penned the novel himself and it took two rewrites before a publisher bought it.

in conclusion, if you enjoy smartly written hard sci-fi, with a bit of an old school feel, then i can recommend this novel to you. if you had enjoyed hal clement’s “mission of gravity” or robert forward’s “rocheworld”, you would probably like this one as well; if you had not read any of these, you might as well start with this one :) .