Search - Dragon's Egg

For those of you out there into sci-fi and who love a good other worldly novel...you may enjoy this book. Back reads: "Men could never live on such a star; only by the most advanced technology can humans exist in synchronous orbit to observe it. The sirface gravity is an incredible sixty-seven billion times that of Earth, with matter so compressed that the mass of a normal star is packed into a crusted sphere only twenty kilometers in diameter. A magnic field 2 trillion times that of Earth distorts the nuclei in the crust and out normal chemical reactions are replaced by neutron reactions. Yet on this impossible world, men detect intellegent life- the cheela, who live so fast the one of our hours is like 100 years in a human life. And as we follow the cheela, they struggle from savagery thru the beginings of agriculture and to the discovery of science. In this moving story we watch them establish contect with the humans orbiting above them. And for a time, men are their teachers. For a brief time...."

Was not at all what I expected, and was very hard to get into. The style of writing is very disjointed and fails to pull you in to the story itself. It's more like reading science notes, and while I love science, it felt really lacking as far as depth and emotional involvement.

Wondering what life on a 65 billion G Neutron Star is like?, December 6, 2005
Reviewer: Josh J. Riley

Ever wonder what life would be like on a 60 billion gravity Neutron Star? Right, probably not. Well, this guy did. And, he wrote a really good story about it.

Dragon's Egg tells a wildly imaginative story of the Cheela, a species of creature that lives on a neutron star. As a consequence of living on a neutron star, molecular chemistry and life itself advances at a rate millions of times faster than us humans are used to. The book tells their story from the Cheela's absolute beginnings when life began on the star all the way to their achievement of becoming sentient beings. In this way, the author makes many interesting and funny parallels to how humans may have evolved from primordial slime to what we are now.

The story focuses on the Cheela, but also includes the side-story of a group of space-exploring humans who happen to be in orbit around the Cheela's home star taking studies. What the humans don't realize is that their presence in the night sky has caused great influence on the Cheela; most notably their ever changing religious beliefs. When the Cheela finally make contact with their supposed human-Gods, they have more to teach them than the humans have to teach the Cheela.

A really fun, imagination-expanding read.