Dragon's Egg

Dragon's Egg is a science fiction novel written by Robert Forward in 1980. It is about life on a neutron star.

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 10km in diameter). This is the "dragon's egg" of the title, so named because from Earth it is observed to be in 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 a massive gravity that restricts their movement in the third dimension. Much of the book concerns the biological 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 experience time thousands of times faster than humans do; a Cheela year goes by in about a human minute.

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.