dragon's egg

Dragon’s Egg, Robert L. Forward 1980

[since I am taking a Twitter break I’ve had free time to go back to, like, reading other stuff that isn’t the infinite scroll of doom. Figured I’d see if I like writing up my thoughts on books I’ve read and see if I like doing that.

spoilers ahead.]

While I was browsing the comments of an article about neutron stars over at Ars Technica I saw this book recommended as a hard sci-fi treatment of a human journey to visit a neutron star.

I’m not sure I’d recommend it on the same premise, but the book was a fun read that certainly surprised me.

2020 via 1980

The book starts out in a fictional 2020 in which people are not all under quarantine. This is a great example of the difficulty of predicting the future forty years in the past. It was immediately remarkable to me that anyone was doing anything collaborative in labs and universities in the spring and summer of 2020. Alas.

The book makes some good and bad predictions here about our current time. It over-predicts a drawdown in investment in space science, doesn’t deal particularly well with the outcome of the cold war (perhaps hard to imagine in 1980, in fairness), and envisions a world where all reasonable computer time is effectively billed and restricted by budgets. This last point is funny, because it is to some extent the eventual outcome of cloud computing, but we’re just not there yet. Not that access to sophisticated computers isn’t gated by budgets and allocated time, but rather that the process would be anything but terribly messy.

Oh also, someone discovers a magnetic monopole on the African continent (I think?) and this revolutionizes the production of energy in the world, enabling exceptionally rapid space travel, and other sci-fi feats of engineering that are the effective “magic” of humans in this imagined future. Really clever concept, honestly, and I wished the book had spent more time on the technical and technological aspects here.

the actual meat of the book

After telling a really hamfisted and one-dimensional story of a plucky graduate student and her discovery of a neutron star hurtling through the solar system, the book gets to its predominant time period: it is 30ish years past 2020 and humans are going to visit this neutron star (which is the titular Dragon’s Egg). The son of the original discoverer is leading the mission but, frankly, this detail hardly matters to the plot and feels like unnecessary window dressing. The book pretty rapidly details how the humans achieved relatively close orbit to the star, and began observations of it. It waves away the obvious radiation and gravitational issues with those magic monopoles I mentioned before. Then, the book really takes a turn into what I’d argue is much closer to fantasy than sci-fi.

Most of the rest of the book is actually devoted to describing the rise of a truly alien form of life on the crust of the neutron star. This life is beholden to the peculiar chemistry and massive gravitational effects of the star.

Eventually, as life is supposedly wont to do, an intelligent species evolves and begins colonizing the star they inhabit. The book spends the majority of its time chronicling the rise of this civilization. There are multiple terrific details about how this new form of life deals with issues like the extreme magnetic fields which make it difficult to move against their flow (the hard direction, as the book puts it), how that life reproduces (eggs), and their exceptional fear of “heights” what with all that gravity. The society that develops around the restrictions and peculiarities of the star is well-imagined, fleshed out, and very engaging.

That said, I should stop here to note that the book is definitely on the “kinda horny” end of the sci-fi spectrum. Not way out there, but the author certainly enjoys repeated references to mating (both human and alien) for whatever reason. It definitely took me out of the story a little because the lack of subtlety or nuance was jarring.

This is a shame, because the rest of the story is really fascinating. The intelligent civilization developing on the neutron star (called cheela) observe the orbiting humans, and the arrangement of asteroids they’ve used as a gravitational stabilizer as a new element in their sky and become determined to learn more about them. The book plays very cleverly with timelines here and has some great surprises I wouldn’t want to spoil.

TL;DR

This book was a fun read I would absolutely recommend for my fellow nerds. It’s not onerously long (I knocked it out over a weekend) and doesn’t overstay its welcome. The imagination and clear use of actual science to drive specific details help it stand out. My biggest issue with the book is that it seems as if the author is more comfortable imagining the interactions of a fictional race of neutron star-dwelling aliens than those of, well, people. Still a good read if the concept tickles your fancy.