Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Published in 1980, parts of the book take place in 2020, so it was interesting to see what Dr. Forward thought of the 2020. There was no virus running rampant, no nut in the White House, and in many ways a saner world than this 2020. Is it too late to change?
Anyway, this is what would be called a hard science fiction book. The human race in 2020 discovers a traveling neutron star passing though the solar system. In 2050, a group of humans find a way to orbit the star to study it. While studying it they discover there is a race of beings that lives on the star that has a gravity of 67 billion g’s. That means whatever something weigh on Earth, it would weigh 67 billion times that on Dragon’s Egg — the name of the neutron star.
The novel is about how the microscopically sized race of beings — the cheela — develop on Dragon’s Egg, before, during, and after human contact. There is no interstellar war, no invasion of Earth, no plaque vested one species by another. It is a story of how a race advances from infancy to maturity, eventually outpacing its teachers — the humans. This happens in part because time passes faster for the cheela than humans. Consequently, the humans seem slow to the cheela and the cheela come and go quickly to the humans.
This is not a perfect book. The humans are father flat, while the physically flat cheela and more well rounded. Also, the idea that humans rather easily share all the knowledge they have with the cheela. Nobody objects to this and nobody has to check back with Earth, which I don’t think would happen in real life. Also, once the cheela surpass the humans, they share many parts of their beyond-human knowledge and send other parts in code that the cheela say the humans will decipher eventually. No explanation for this cloaking of knowledge is given and it strikes as bit of a plot device than an organic part of the story.
Overall, an interesting read, especially if hard science fiction is you interest.
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