Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

If you haven’t read RL Forward’s Dragon’s Egg then take the weekend off and treat yourself.

A 1980s hard sci-fi novel depicting the saga of a species called cheela: creatures who have evolved to live on the surface of a neutron star, where the forces of nature are so powerful that daily life is 1,000,000x faster than that of human beings.

...with hilarious consequences!!

View on HN

One of the best hard SF books I have ever read. I agree with your description, but for those unfamiliar this is not a Terry Pratchett comedic story. Forward was a physicist who specialized in gravity.

This is a great novel, and very interesting and entertaining. I have also heard it described as a physics textbook masquerading as fiction, because it teaches you a lot!

Oh cool - I read this as a kid and think of revisiting it from time to time, but couldn't remember what it was called, nor enough google-able details to find it. Thanks for mentioning it!

I bought it this morning based on your suggestion and so far I really like it. Thanks!

Edit: Coincidently, the first chapters of this book play in June 2020. Computers are very expensive devices where there's always hardly any money left to do long operations on it and everybody always prints out screens on large paper rolls :-)

Seconded. As I mentioned when this last came up, I encourage to read also Stephen Baxter's "Flux". (Even crazier, here the lifeforms dwell inside the neutron star, in the neutron superfluid.)

I have not read the sequel.

His son wrote a book called The Owl that was not sci-fi at all, but I came across the news of the Dragon's Egg sequel when I went looking for The Owl.

I read this as a kid and forgotten the name of the book. Thank you - it is indeed very, very, hard sci-fi and even the story is somewhat boring still interesting to read

Reply on news.ycombinator.com