Dragon's Egg

“In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind--and this is one of them.”--Arthur C. Clarke In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms--the cheela--living on Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers. Praise for Dragon’s Egg “Bob Forward writes in the tradition of Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity and carries it a giant step (how else?) forward.” --Isaac Asimov “ Dragon’s Egg is superb. I couldn’t have written it; it required too much real physics.” --Larry Niven “This is one for the real science-fiction fan.” --Frank Herbert “Robert L. Forward tells a good story and asks a profound question. If we run into a race of creatures who live a hundred years while we live an hour, what can they say to us or we to them?” --Freeman J. Dyson “Forward has impeccable scientific credentials, and . . . big, original, speculative ideas.” -- The Washington Post

ldquo;A knockout . . . In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind—and this is one of them.”—Arthur C. Clarke
 
“Bob Forward writes in the tradition of Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity and carries it a giant step (how else?) forward.”—Isaac Asimov
 
“Dragon’s Egg is superb. I couldn’t have written it; it required too much real physics.”—Larry Niven
 
“This is one for the real science-fiction fan.”—Frank Herbert
 
“Robert L. Forward tells a good story and asks a profound question. If we run into a race of creatures who live a hundred years while we live an hour, what can they say to us or we to them?”—Freeman J. Dyson
 
“Forward has impeccable scientific credentials, and . . . big, original, speculative ideas.”—The Washington Post

Autorentext
Robert L. Forward was a consulting scientist, future technologist, lecturer, and science fact and fiction writer. He was the author of Dragon’s Egg and its sequel, Starquake, as well as ten other science fiction novels, three works of science fact, and numerous popular science articles and short stories. He died in 2002.

Klappentext

"In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind-and this is one of them."-Arthur C. Clarke

In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms-the cheela-living on Dragon's Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers.

Praise for Dragon's Egg

"Bob Forward writes in the tradition of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and carries it a giant step (how else?) forward."-Isaac Asimov

"Dragon's Egg is superb. I couldn't have written it; it required too much real physics."-Larry Niven

"This is one for the real science-fiction fan."-Frank Herbert

"Robert L. Forward tells a good story and asks a profound question. If we run into a race of creatures who live a hundred years while we live an hour, what can they say to us or we to them?"-Freeman J. Dyson

"Forward has impeccable scientific credentials, and . . . big, original, speculative ideas."-The Washington Post

Leseprobe
Pulsar
 
TIME: THURSDAY 23 APRIL 2020
 
Jacqueline Carnot strode over to a long table in the data processing lab in the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Research Center at CalTech. A frown clouded her pretty face. The cut of her shoulder-length brown hair and her careful choice of tailored clothing stamped her at once as “European.”
 
Her skirt, blouse and clogs were her only items of clothing. It was not that she did not own stockings—and purses—and makeup—and rings—and perfume—and other “women’s things;” it was just that she was in too much of a hurry in the morning to bother with them, for she had work to do. The French government had not given her a state fellowship to study at the International Space Institute so she could spend all morning getting dressed.
 
The slender woman swiftly cleared the table of its accumulated scraps of paper and tossed down a long data record at one end. The cylinder of paper rolled obediently across the table, then obstinately off the end and five meters across the floor before it finally stopped. Jacqueline left the roll on the floor and started to analyze the data. This menial task would normally have been handled by a computer. Unfortunately, computers now insisted on a charge number for everything, and when Jacqueline had logged on this morning she had found that the meager balance that she had been saving out of Professor Sawlinski’s allocation for her thesis had been swallowed up by another retroactive intercurrency account readjustment. She knew that Sawlinski had plenty of rubles in his research budget; but, without his budget authorization and his personal approval to the computer (by the crypto-password that she knew, but dared not use), she was reduced to waiting and hand-processing until he returned.
 
“Actually, it was fun working with the numbers in this personal way. With the computer doing the analysis, the numbers would be crammed into digital bins whether they were real data or noise, and right now there was a lot of scruffy noise on the graph.
 
The data Jacqueline was analyzing came from the low frequency radio detectors on the old CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe that was the first major cooperative effort between the Soviets and Europeans. Back in the early days of the race to the Moon, the Europeans had supplied the first Soviet lunar rover with laser retroreflectors. Then, after a disastrous experience with the Americans in which one of America’s four precious Shuttle spacecraft and Europe’s only SpaceLab had exploded on the launch pad, the Europeans had turned back to the East for cooperation. The Europeans built the instrumentation for an Out-of-the-Ecliptic spacecraft that was launched by one of the giant Russian launch vehicles. The craft first traveled five astronomical units out to Jupiter. But once there, instead of taking pictures and going on to other planets as previous spacecraft had done, it went under Jupiter’s south pole- to shoot straight up out of the plane formed by the orbits of the planets.
 
As the spacecraft climbed up out of the ecliptic plane, its sensors began to see a new picture of the Sun. The magnetic fields that blossomed out from the sunspots at the middle latitudes of the Sun were now attenuated, while new effects began to dominate the scene.
 
The data from the CCCP-ESA Out-of-the-Ecliptic probe had been thoroughly analyzed by many well-funded scientific groups early in the mission. The information gathered had shown that the Sun had a case of indigestion. It had eaten too many black holes.
 
The scientists found an extremely periodic fluctuation in the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field. The magnetosphere of the Sun had many variations, of course. Each sunspot was a major source of variability. However, sunspots were irregular in time and were so strong in the middle latitudes that they dominated everything. It was not until the OE probe was above the Sun, sampling data for long periods of time, that the finely detailed, highly periodic variatio…