Dragon's Egg
| Author | Robert Forward |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Dragon's Egg |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 345 pp |
| ISBN | 0-345-28646-4 |
| Followed by | Starquake |
Dragon's Egg is a science fiction novel written by Robert Forward and published in 1980 (ISBN 0-345-28646-4). It is about life on a neutron star.
Plot introduction
In Dragon's Egg, Forward describes the history and development of a life form (the Cheela) that evolves on the surface of a neutron star (a highly dense collapsed star, about 20 km in diameter). This is the "dragon's egg" of the title, so named because from Earth it is observed to be near the tail of the constellation Draco ("the dragon"). The Cheela develop sentience and intelligence, despite their relative small size (an individual Cheela has approximately the volume of a sesame seed, but the mass of a human) and an intense gravity field that restricts their movement in the third dimension. Much of the book concerns the biologic and social development of the Cheela; a subplot is the arrival of a human vessel nearby the neutron star, and the eventual contact that is made between the humans and the Cheela. A major problem in this contact is that the Cheela live a million times more quickly than humans do; a Cheela year goes by in about 30 human seconds.
The humans arrive when the Cheela are a savage, backward species, fighting rival clans in a subsistence-level society. Within a few human days, or a few thousand Cheela years, the Cheela surpass the humans in technology, and the humans are affectionately called "the Slow Ones".
Forward wrote a sequel to Dragon's Egg, called Starquake, which deals with the consequences of the Cheela developing space travel, and of a seismic disturbance that kills most of the Cheela on the surface of the neutron star.
Major themes
The key attractions of this story and its sequel are:
- Life based on nuclear interactions vs. electronic/chemical interactions
- Communication between two races, one which is a million times as fast as the other
- "Monopole-pumped black hole dust" used in Cheela anti-gravity machines
- Life on a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times Earth gravity, and a surface temperature of 8200 K
- Faster-than-light technology / time-travel technology
- Cheela waiting, bored, while their ship accelerates to half the speed of light in order to reach escape velocity from their home
- The rise and fall and rise of Cheela empires, with several notable characters
- A description of how humans may nullify the tidal forces near neutron stars, and go into close orbit