Starquake by Robert L. Forward
Highly Original Hard Science Fiction And A Gripping Story As Well
Starquake, the sequel to Dragon’s Egg, takes place on the surface of a
neutron star. The gravity is 67 billion Earth gravities. The native “cheela”,
the size of sesame seeds, live a million times faster than their human
friends in orbit. After a starquake, the humans have only one day to save
the remains of cheela civilization from extinction.
Personal Review: Starquake by Robert L. Forward
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.
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Starquake by Robert L. Forward 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!