Customer Reviews

Starquake

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're not excited by feeling your mind being stretched by science that is right at the very edge of theoretical physics, then you may be someone who thinks this book is "boring". If you aren't filled with wonder as an entire utterly alien civilization is presented to you, then you might not like this book.

But if you're enraptured by a plausible alien civilization that uses almost future-magic technology which is nevertheless comprehensible (especially if you're an avid reader of physics journals or popularizations), then this book will be one of your favorites.

Negatives: Bob Forward is at his best when writing about the science; he is weakest when writing dialog. For the alien dialog, this isn't really a problem, but sometimes the way his human characters phrase their sentences will make one wince. I found this fairly easy to overlook, but others may not.

. . .and in my experience, sequels can be difficult to make "work". Robert Forward, brilliant in "Dragon's Egg" is less brilliant here, primarily because this novel requires more actual "storytelling", character development, and plot than "hard science" -- and hard science is what Forward does best.

Nevertheless, if you enjoyed "Dragon's Egg" and wish to delve more deeply into the lives of the Cheela, you won't be disappointed. I'm rounding up to four stars.

If you're not excited by feeling your mind being stretched by science that is right at the very edge of theoretical physics, then you may be someone who thinks this book is "boring". If you aren't filled with wonder as an entire utterly alien civilization is presented to you, then you might not like this book.

But if you're enraptured by a plausible alien civilization that uses almost future-magic technology which is nevertheless comprehensible (especially if you're an avid reader of physics journals or popularizations), then this book will be one of your favorites.

Negatives: Bob Forward is at his best when writing about the science; he is weakest when writing dialog. For the alien dialog, this isn't really a problem, but sometimes the way his human characters phrase their sentences will make one wince. I found this fairly easy to overlook, but others may not.

The key attractions of this story and its sequel "Starquake" are:

1) Life based on neutronic interactions vs electronic/chemical interactions

2) Communication between two races, one which is 1 million times faster than the other.

3) "Monopole-pumped black hole dust" used in Cheela anti-gravity machines

4) Life on a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 BILLION times earth gravity, and a surface temperature of 8200 K.

5) Faster-than-light technology / time-travel technology, described almost believably

6) Cheela waiting, bored, while their ship accelerates to half the speed of light, over 1 kilometer of acceleration, in order to reach escape velocity from their home. 50% light-speed, over 1 km??

7) Rise and fall and rise of Cheela empires, with several very interesting characters

8) A very plausible description of how humans may nullify the tidal forces near neutron stars, and go into close orbit.

Dragons Egg and Star Quake are my all time favourite sci-fi books ! (Star Quake is the follow on to Dragons Egg) I just could not put this book down ! Trying to describe the story line in the space available would not do the book justice. Robert's description of this civilization, its history and its personal stories in all of its micro wonders is just amazing. This book is hard to find, if you see it anywhere ... BUY IT IMMEDIATELY !

How long does it take for a civilization to rise from one of hunter-gatherers to interstellar spaceflight? Or to fall back again to primitive, subsistence levels? Years? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?

For the cheela, just a few hours.

The cheela are among the most intriguing aliens ever to appear in science fiction and are both at the same time quite alien and also quite familiar. They don't live on any terrestrial world like Earth, Mars, or even the Moon. They inhabit the surface of a rapidly rotating neutron star 20 kilometers in diameter, one dubbed Dragon's Egg, visited by humanity in the year 2050.

Dragon's Egg is unimaginably harsh by human standards; a crushing surface gravity equivalent to 67 billion Earth gravities, an 8200 K surface temperature, a massive magnetic field, and a rotation rate of about 5 times a second.

Though the typical cheela weighs as much as a human, they are little larger than a sesame seed. Instead of being comprised of what the cheela called "expanded matter," they are instead made up of nucleonic matter. The nuclei in the cheela body have lost their electron clouds, crushed by the high gravity and intense magnetic fields into a tiny and super dense form (one that will collapse at a touch anything made of normal matter). In physical appearance they are glowing, white hot vaguely slug-like organisms, with a slug-like tread used for locomotion and seeing through a ring of twelve stalked eyes all around their periphery and able to manipulate items through a series of limbs.

The cheela though are stranger yet. Not only does the neutron star move fast, the cheela live and die very fast, by human standards at least. One day on Egg (what the cheela call their world) is equivalent to 0.2 human seconds; the cheela live their lives a million times faster than humans do. A cheela year only lasts 29 human seconds. A cheela generation is 15 minutes apart, and a cheela lives on average about 45 minutes, an entire life of growing up, going to school, mating, having a career, and retiring. One hundred cheela generations will have come and gone in the span of a single human day.

_Starquake_ is the sequel to the brilliant earlier novel by Robert L. Forward, _Dragon's Egg_. Owing to the nature of time in the book, it is really more a continuation of the first book, not a sequel, as only minutes I believe separate the events from the end of the first book from the opening events in the second. The cheela, having advanced from basically what we might call something akin to Neolithic times to a civilization that has mastered the use of artificial black holes in the space of about a human day or so (these events were covered in the first novel), have long since surpassed humanity's technical achievements. The astronauts who visited Egg were about to leave for home but a disaster occurs, one that is averted only by what are to human standards very quick action on the part of the cheela. Grateful for the assistance, the humans pledge that they will aid the cheela any way they can. The cheela, while quite polite, decline, wondering how they could ever provide any additional help to them; they wish their human friends a safe trip home.

As one might guess from the title, a massive starquake occurs, killing nearly every cheela and destroying their civilization. Can humanity help? How will the few brave cheela that survive the catastrophe rebuild their world?

Owing to the time perception differences, by necessity most of the book is told from the point of view of the cheela, as many interesting cheela live epic lives trying to save themselves, their friends, their world, to remake their civilization in the span of mere minutes and hours for their human friends. I think the book was a bit slow at first, as the author spent a good deal of time explaining how cheela spacecraft, space elevators, and launcher facilities might work, something hard to manage as it is in our world but to me inconceivably difficult in a world where a vessel needs to achieve a significant fraction of the speed of light in order to reach escape velocity and make it into space. A bit technical at times, once the starquake occurs the book becomes quite gripping, a wonderful story of heroes, villains, and great personal sacrifice.

Definitely one of the most original science fiction sagas out there and well worth reading.

I get the idea that Dr. Forward just wanted to write a sequel. This book's premise is interesting - the cheela, due to their sped-up lifetime, have only one day (human time) for their earthling friends to figure out how to save them. I didn't like the characters as much and the story didn't hold my interest as much as the first book, but I still recommend it to fans of "Dragon's Egg" and those who love really scientific sci-fi.

This is a great read, I was very impressed with the premise of the novel. I hope Mr. Forward writes more stories about these truly unique characters.

You have got to love the challenge Forward sets out for himself in the Dragon's Egg, and in this sequel, Starquake. He has a mid-21st century crew of astronauts sent out from Earth to discover and interact with the most exotic of species, living on the most exotic of worlds. The "Cheela" are intelligent beings inhabiting the surface of a neutron star. They eat and think and fight, and romance, and even cultivate "plants" and "animals" much as we do. However, due to the forces inherent to nucleonic matter, the Cheela are barreling through time (as defined by the pace of sequential events) at a clip one million times faster than humans. They experience the changing stages of social evolution just as rapidly. The inter-species interaction itself is brief: the two novels span just two Earth days and thus hundreds of Cheela generations. In these short hours, the neutron star civilization has time to rise up from barbarism not once, but twice, and the Earthlings and Cheela each experience their own epic disasters requiring that they spend some of their time rescuing each other. The story of Dragon's Egg was brilliantly original and bold. It was a thrilling ride, with the reader witnessing the mutual discovery of the most disparate life forms by each other, and was filled with wild inventiveness. Furthermore, the first book exemplified Clarke's axiom about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and showed how widespread social belief in magic can a drive a people in very strange directions.

But the novelty of Dragon's Egg has worn off a bit in Starquake. One feels that Forward was compelled to complete his challenge in full, with a multitude of material and social interactions explored. Epic history is made through every sort of species-specific and inter-species act of heroism. To further facilitate this, some lucky individual Cheela escape their brief 45 minute life-span limit, and via a convenient rejuvenation process live on for multiple generations to stay with us much of the tale. Unfortunately, even in such creative surroundings with: monopoles; black hole dust; millimeter mountain ranges; trillion Gauss magnetic fields; the setting of an 8000 K stellar surface, a familiar problem of some Forward novels comes to bear in Starquake. Its thin plot is peopled with superficial characters who can not fight their way out of the sea of technical details inundating the story (earning it the "hard science fiction" mantle), so as to carry our interest very well.

Dragon's Egg is a stand-out book. The ideas expressed in it were fresh, original and presented in a dynamic and interesting way.

Starquake doesn't *quite* live up to the original. By the point where Starquake starts, a lot of the initial sense of wonder has faded to familiarity and the slack needs to be taken up with characterization which, let us being honest, was not Forward's strong suite.

Be that as it may, the story is engaging and I'm glad that we got to spend some more time with the Cheela who are, in my opinion, perhaps the most interesting race of aliens in all of the annals of science fiction.