After a couple
of drafts and a detailed critique from ace SF editor Lester del Rey,
Del Rey Books bought the novel and published it in 1980. It won solid reviews
from the likes of Publisher's Weekly and the Washington Post,
spent years in print, and recently returned as part of Del Rey's Impact
line of SF classics.
Heavy stranger in our
neighborhood
The "Dragon's Egg" is a neutron
star passing through the outer reaches of the solar system. Despite having
nearly half the mass of our sun, it's too distant to be any threat to 21st-Century
humanity -- it's merely a scientific curiosity.
When an exploration team
arrives, however, they are astonished to discover life on the star's surface.
The cheela are slug-like creatures about the size of a sesame seed, but
their incredible density means that their mass and physical complexity
is roughly equivalent to that of a 200-pound human.
The cheela's high-energy
environment also means that they live about a million times as fast as
humans. Their "day" passes in a fifth of a second and a human minute seems
as long as a year to a cheela.
Forward makes the most of
the complications involved in making contact with such a fast-moving species.
Communication proves difficult but not impossible, and creative solutions
to the time problem provide some of the best moments in the book.
Life among the cheela
Where the book really stands
out, however, is in the sections devoted to the lives of Forward's alien
cheela.
Forward follows their civilization
from the discovery of agriculture -- which occurs on Sunday, May 22, 2050,
in Earth chronology -- to the beginning of their space age less than an
Earth-month later. We see their grand journeys across the star's 60-kilometer
circumference, the invention of mathematics, and the birth of religion
and astronomy.
In the wrong hands, the cheela
development would be cute or anthropomorphic. Forward almost always avoids
those traps.
Cheela behavior sometimes
parallels human behavior, but only when the basic motivation -- food or
survival, for instance -- is almost identical. Forward portrays his aliens'
other behaviors are logical but inhuman, driven as they are by completely
different conditions.
Who needs humans?
While they may not be human,
the cheela always seem like people. The characters share a common questing
spirit, but they stand out as individuals.
The same can't be said for
the human characters. They're perfect representatives of the cardboard
scientists typical of hard SF.
Despite a lively prologue,
the early scenes among the humans are painfully dull, and could probably
have been skipped entirely -- especially since Forward has included a "technical
appendix" that covers the same information and is more fun to read.
The humans become more interesting
when they finally mount an expedition to Dragon's Egg, but that's mostly
thanks to their interaction with the cheela.
... Not hard SF!
It's a flaw that makes the
novel particularly representative of its sub-genre. Hard science fiction
is a game of asking "what if?" and the cheela are the heart of the question
driving Dragon's Egg.
It's an approach that inevitably
limits the appeal of hard SF -- most people would rather read about people
than ideas or even strange alien mindsets. Still, the cheela are just as
charming today as they were twenty years ago.
If they're fascinating, it's
because Forward is fascinated by them, and had the writing skill to communicate
his interest to his readers. If the human scientists are dull, it's because
they're simply a means to the end of understanding the aliens.
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