Dragon's Egg

Classic Hardcore Hard-SF. :) Really hardcore, even, written by an astrophysicist and wild with the worldbuilding. :) It's the concept that shines. Think about the extended growth of a people from hunters and gatherers all the way to a massively accomplished civilization in the space of a single novel......more

TIME: 06:32:46.1 GMT APRIL 1 1978 "I have researched it in every detail!" t'trummed Sky-Talker, as she waved her front manipulators impatiently. "For five greats of turns, I have done nothing else! You say that there is no way to communicate with the Slow Ones? Well, you are wrong!" "But I still don'......more

Dragon's Egg has nothing to do with dragons -- the dragon's egg is a neutron star being visited by humans who are suspending themselves in a stationary orbit by means of a propulsion laser. The laser light falls to and illuminates a small portion of the surface of the star. As it happens, the surface......more

Oh that was painful, but I finished it for my book club, and for science. And make no mistake: the science in this book is mind-bendingly excellent. Robert L. Forward's ideas (life on a neutron star, contact between cultures who exist at different time-scales, etc) are the kind of top-notch speculat......more

On the one hand, here we've got an extremely interesting high-concept sci-fi story — quite "hard" sci-fi up until they get so advanced as to be incomprehensible — written by a real physicist and aerospace engineer. On the other hand … well, it also reads like it was written by a physicist, and not by......more