Starquake

Cheela #2

by Robert L. Forward

Disaster destroys most of the Cheela, a race of intelligent aliens who live on the surface of a neutron star, and it is up to the human explorers who discovered them to help save the survivors

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Hard Science Fiction, Space Opera, Novels, Speculative Fiction, Space

339 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Robert Lull Forward, commonly known as Robert L. Forward, (August 15, 1932 - September 21, 2002) was an American physicist and science fiction writer. His fiction is noted for its scientific credibility, and uses many ideas developed during his work as an aerospace engineer.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sequel to Dragon's Egg picks up right after the first... which is already rather extraordinary for regular time-constraint purposes.

Just imagine first-contact with little super-dense and fast-living aliens living on a neutron star passing through our Solar System. Now imagine how fast they live: one-million times faster than we do. Civilizations rise and fall in a single day. Technological breakthroughs, cultural revolutions, vast discoveries, and vaster falls can happen in the space of moments.

This happened in the first book. A week for us saw the Chela try to interpret the super slow movements of gods in the sky, go through revolutions, scientific breakthroughs, and finally society capable of waiting for whole generations to speak a few words to us. :)

Add to that some pretty awesome science on both sides done realistic enough to surprise the crap out of me, end the book on a really high note of a new alien civilization having taken all our combined knowledge to take it further than we ever dreamed... and then give us book two. :)

This is where we begin... and within a day, the massively amazing technologically broken-through society, even now fulfilling a dream of time-travel... falls.

Easy come? Easy go. The fall and the redemption of both their species and the fate of our astronauts. So fun. :)

My only complaint? The Chela may look weird and have VERY strange biology, but psychologically they're pretty much exactly like us.

Fortunately, the science and the ideas more than make up for this slight flaw. :)

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler lite, video review HERE. Direct continuation from Dragon's Egg, Forward came up with a tricky situation for both the Cheela and the humans, with a great conclusion. I hope if we make alien contact they are as nice and helpful as the Cheela.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in May 1999.

Starquake and Dragon's Egg, the novel to which it forms a sequel, contain some of the most unusual aliens ever envisaged by a science fiction writer. Forward, with an engineering background, has written some of the most interesting 'hard' science fiction. This is a term used for strongly ideas based writing, using the latest scientific knowledge and incorporating a great deal of physics as accurately as possible.

Dragon's Egg contains all the interesting scientific background which is in the sequel: the carefully worked out microscopic processes and structures which make life on the surface of a neutron star - so dense atoms are crushed - not only possible but plausible. On the star (named Dragon's Egg because viewed from Earth it could be seen as an egg laid by the constellation Draco), the processes on which this life is based run far faster than the molecular chemistry which makes earth biology possible, with the result that lifeforms on the star evolve incredibly fast, in days rather than millions of years. So as a human spaceship orbits Dragon's Egg, they are able to observe the evolution of the chela from savagery to civilisation surpassing human knowledge.

Starquake contains effectively three stories: a rescue of the humans by the chela when the systems designed to protect them against the tidal effects caused by the star's massive gravity fail; then the humans help chela society revive after a massive star-quake destroys civilisation; finally, the chelas, again surpassing mankind, save the humans from death brought about by their overstay round the star to help the chela.

The problem with Starquake is that the interesting ideas are identical to ones in the first book; character has taken a back seat to the physics in both novels, with the result that there is little to build on here. The chela are not interesting as aliens in a psychological sense: there are no massive differences from human sociology or even earth biological systems (they are two-sexed egg-laying creatures) for the writer to explore.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very “goodread”, indeed! I had this on my shelf, unread, for many years. I had to go back and pick up Dragon’s Egg, and read it, before reading this book. I am very glad I did read them both. Very enjoyable. Heavy science. That was way above my pay grade, but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the books.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this soon after having read Dragon’s Egg, which continues from where that first book left off. I loved the time difference between both the human and that of the Cheela (who’s time rate is a million times faster). If you loved the first book, this second instalment is much of the same. Could have been published as - and has, now that I looked into it - one brick of a book.

[Elizabeth Castro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starquake kept me reading, but by the middle of the book I was so bogged down by technical "facts" I lost sight of any plot line that might have been. The world building Robert L. Forward uses is so intense I spent most of my time trying to process what I was reading.
When I got to the last page, I thought, "that was it?" I felt like a deflated balloon after spending so much time on a story that could have been at least a hundred pages shorter.
AFTER the book is done there is an illuminating "Technical Appendix" that would have been much more helpful written into the story so I could have understood it better. I found the appendix writing more interesting than the actual book.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a disappointment in comparison to Dragon's Egg. Though it's still hard SF, I suppose, as any story about a civilization that lives on the surface of a neutron star must be, the cheelah behave just slightly too humanly for my comfort, despite having a dozen eyes each and looking like bugs.

Unique enough to hold my attention sufficiently to see how the story ends.

[Daniel Kenefick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as good as the first one. Watching a high-speed civilization evolve from the stone age to high-tech in a few human minutes was fun in the first book, but the author seems to have piled contrivance on convenience in order to do the same thing again.

Retreading the same ground can be fun, but I found this one difficult to get through. The writing was rough to the point of being jarring. For example, here are four adjacent sentences in the book:

The next thing you knew, female cheela would be aborting their eggs because they got "tired of carrying them." They should be thankful they weren't human females who had to take care of their offspring after they were hatched. Cliff-Web had a modern holovid set with full computer accessories. The computer was not quite as intelligent as a robot, but nearly as good.

That's right, we went from abortion to computer specs without so much as a paragraph break.

[Onetwofoureight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Follow up to Dragon's egg. Nice and easy to read. Has at least two surprising plot twists. But becomes a bit boring and foreseeable at the end. Still better than most of the first contact-stories I read this year.

[Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ye that wasn't it any more. Too many made up words, which, sure, different society, different concepts, but when the other half of what's being written is physics stuff you have trouble wrapping your head around, then you do not want to waste time on cutesie words making things more complicated than necessary. Debated a one star, but at least the last third or so I managed to just go through in one go. Before that was a sufferfest.

[Florin Constantinescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starquake picks up immediately where its predecessor Dragon's Egg left off. It's basically an "expansion pack". Whatever worked with the first book in the series - works with this sequel, even the crazier neutron star physics thrown in for good measure.
The humans on-board their vessel orbiting the neutron star get to witness a starquake and with it the fall of the Cheela civilization, only to watch it rise again in a few minutes' time.
A further sequel seeing the Cheela explore the galaxy would probably have been fun!

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forward writes the best hard science fiction.

[Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A completely enjoyable blend of sophisticated astrophysics and super-goofy sci-fi tropes.

[Chris Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book Review – Starquake – Robert L. Forward – 1985
Well folks here is the 5th book of the armful of old sci-fi novels that I picked up at my local used store, Valley Wild Books in Littleton, MA.
And, we have reached a milestone, because this was the first one that I decided to tap out on. Yup. Couldn’t get through it. According to my bookmark I made it to page 95.
This novel is a sequel, actually a direct continuation, of Forward’s Dragon’s Egg.
The conceit here is that the Cheela are a civilization of aliens that live on the surface of a neutron star. This conceit allows Forward to play with all the hard science fiction around that. How gravity is billions of times more and how this impacts relativity between the Cheela and the observing humans.
I get it. Science is cool. But in the early days of science fiction, it was REALLY cool. So cool that scientists wrote hard science fiction for other scientists.
And this is what this is.
I mean, MY GOD it has a 21-page technical appendix with drawings and charts and cites scientific literature references.
I felt like I was back at school with a physics book open and a mean old teacher quizzing me. (And I liked Theoretical Physics).
I don’t have the energy to plow through a book that cares way more for its scientific voracity than it does about its characters and its story. The actual writing, the story and character development, are just window dressing for the ‘big ideas’ of the science.
I understand and appreciate the old days when science fiction tried to make everything makes sense within a natural world framework. In a way it justified the fiction.
And I also appreciate how young much of this science was at the time. Neutron stars and black holes and all the related majesty of the universe was just coming into focus and science fiction writers and scientists had these new places to play.
Maybe I’ll get back into this novel at some point, but for now I just didn’t care enough to continue.
Chris Russell
ChrisRussellAuthor dot com

[James White · Rating 3 out of 5]

As everyone has already said, this suffers in comparison to Dragons Egg, as many sequels do. Without the world-building, it gets bogged down in technical details in places, and there were many paragraphs I didn't read because it became like wading through technical specs.

Some of the bigger issues I found: the Cheela at the end of Dragons Egg are "many thousands of years" beyond human learning at this point, and yet they still have very 20th century political and money issues. Perhaps their technical knowledge is better. As Star Trek taught us, technology moves faster than people think. Star Trek put communicators 400 years away, and we have better things than they devised just 50 years later. It's unavoidable, but to claim they were thousands of years ahead, I would have expected them to be in a realm indistinguishable from magic, transcending the physical universe. Better if he had said a couple of centuries, but that's quibbling.

I also found the Cheela changing their names at major events hard to follow, especially as they are short lived compared to humans and change anyway, but actually we don't get too much character so it wasn't nearly as bad as the technical parts.

Although you could feel the 1950s sensibilities of the author, it was lovely to see him trying for better. A few times, I expected the joke to end up sexist and he surprised me by going the other way. James Hogan has become difficult to read because women are always beautiful and worship their bosses, and the men smoke in literally every scene. Forward did much better here, despite the fact that it is a period piece, as all things will become.

I read Dragons Egg in the 1990s, just out of university and loved it. I read it again in my late 40s and it's becoming old fashioned, but it's a great idea and he's told a story well. There's a few bits he had to hand-wave, because it's fiction, but it's a great book. 5* for Dragons Egg, but 3* for Starquake.

[Gary Burnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The plot of this sequel is 10x more interesting that the other book Dragon's Egg. My big complaint with the original book was that it was boring, but this time around I didn't feel that at all. And it stayed true to it's hard scifi roots. The science parts were really well done and had me googling and learning a lot about gravity, magnetism, neutrons, everything.

I applaud the genuinely diverse cast of characters both for the humans and the cheela and I think a real strength of this story was how they balanced the storylines between the two species. Give the difference in how they experience time, this wasn't necessarily an easy task. It helped that every section shows the date and the time that the scene is taking place. I did find myself counting the minutes between scenes and using the table in the back of the book to calculate how much cheela time had passed.

I think it would have been really easy for Forward to stick to a simple society, but instead this story takes place over many cheela generations and through various types of societies (from cavemen, to spacer, and everything in between). Each era had it's own social, political, and economic challenges which made their evolution feel natural and engaging.

The Starquake chapter was like a slasher. That was intense body horror that came out of nowhere and I ate it up. Given this chapter is also the title of the book, there were high expectations and they were more than met.

Because we got to spend so much time with each of the main characters from the cheela, it was easy to develop an emotional attachment. The humans definitely could have used more fleshing-out but honestly the story isn't about them, they really just help the cheela every so often.

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the first book was full of novel ideas, especially in terms of astrobiology, this book added almost nothing new in terms of concepts. What it did was basically impose human (aka familiar) situations into the Cheela society … which is honestly not all that interesting. I was quite bored reading about how Cheela politics were slowing down the funding of new projects and the is and outs of inter-tribal warfare. It was the same old human shit just with random Cheela names and funny new devices. Likewise there was so much time spent with Cheela just tinkering with / building machines that rely on physics beyond our comprehension—totally not interesting. I much preferred the approach of the first book: explain briefly what the idea is behind the machine and then spend only a page or two on how it gets built. I don’t need to hear about every time a Cheela needed to take a wrench to the machine.

Lacks the imagination and novelty of the first book. Skip this one.

[Diego Muñoz García · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Estrellamoto' sumerge al lector en la fascinante civilización cheela, seres de materia nuclear en una estrella de neutrones que viven un millón de veces más rápido que los humanos. Tras absorber el conocimiento humano, los cheela alcanzan avances como reactores de fusión de protones y experimentos de distorsión temporal, pero un devastador "terremoto estelar" colapsa su sociedad. La novela brilla por su rigor científico, detallando tecnologías basadas en fuerzas fuertes y campos de quarks, aunque peca de antropomorfizar los conflictos cheela, con políticas y disputas que recuerdan demasiado a las humanas. Los neologismos nucleares, como "flujo-cristal", a veces entorpecen la lectura. Pese a esto, la redención de los cheela y el escape humano ante la inestabilidad del púlsar ofrecen un cierre especulativo potente. Recomendable para fans de la ciencia ficción dura que disfruten mundos extremos, aunque menos innovadora que su predecesora.

[Kevin Y Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dragon's Egg was one of my favorite books that I read last year - an intriguing story about humans discovering intelligent life on a neutron star that lives a million times faster than we do! I didn't realize there was a sequel until now, and immediately bought it.

Unfortunately, the first 1/3 of the book felt like the author had a bunch of random, unrelated sci-fi ideas and just decided to explore them one by one as technology used by the now highly advanced Cheela civilization. Without an interesting plot backing them up, these parts were a chore to read through and too easy to gloss over. Looking back, this section was basically just introducing the characters, but bloated too heavily with technical passages.

But then, the story picks up and I couldn't put the book down until the end! The story was more thrilling than the first book, and again there were lots of cool ideas.

[Jevon Knights · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another highly imaginative novel, the 2nd book does a much better job of a story arc with cheela saving the humans, having a disaster of their own that cripples society, and the humans save the cheela in return. I'm glad that Robert had much less human chapters, much less charts and graphs, and much more action. We also get much more cheela culture, which is as shocking as it is amazing, the most alien of aliens I have ever read/visualized.

While there was a protagonist for most of the story, it was still difficult to get attach to anyone because of the span of multiple generations. And unfortunately my ebook version's formatting was so bad that it made reading a challenge. Still an impactful read if you can handle all the faults.

[Jack Grimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starquake is really good. It's an excursion into a completely, imaginatively alien world that will leave you not just familiar with but attached to its inhabitants. The concept of the time difference in experience between humans made of traditional molecules and creatures made of nucleonic material is wild. The high-end physics and technology achieved by a civilization that runs at that speed is also crazy but entirely consistent with the framework Forward builds. The cultural stuff is corny but in a way that's kind of charming and is also wholly apologized for by the premise that their development was kickstarted by human knowledge. I thoroughly enjoyed this one & I recommend it.

[Constance · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a squeal to Dragon's Egg. I gave Dragon's Egg 5 stars. This squeal was interesting but not nearly as intriguing as Dragon's Egg. You could read it or not after Dragon's Egg and I would not feel you have missed much but also it is a fairly quick read so if you want to know what happens to the Humans and the Chella next it is worth picking up.

[Angel B.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Continúan las temporalmente desfasadas aventuras de cheela y humanos. Falta el factor sorpresa de la primera novela, pero sigue siendo entretenida. La tecnocháchara abruma un poco por su cantidad y por ese motivo ya no apetece tanto intentar descifrar hasta que punto se ajusta a la ciencia conocida, pero puedes ignorarla y seguir la historia.

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Continuation of the story in Dragon's Egg. The fast living Cheela become space faring, only to have their world wracked by a quake that shreds the star's surface. Interesting story, probably best having read the first book, but I think sufficient backstory is provided at the start to get the gist.

[Mary T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dragon’s Egg did not need a sequel. However, about halfway through the book I did get caught up in the continuing history of cheelah civilization. The humans were still boring, as they also were in the first book.

[Nestor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una magnífica segunda parte aún mejor que la primera, dónde los cheela no solo recuperan su civilización luego del estrellamoto, sino que ayudan a los seres humanos a volver a la suya con tecnologías más allá del conocimiento humano. Es realmente es hard sci-fi.

[Molezooka · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best hard science, alternate/alien society novels I have ever read.

[Morgan McGuire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the fonts on the cover of this book.

[Xabi1990 · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10. Valoración media de los 3 libros leídos del autor : 5/10

[Rosa Chacón García · Rating 3 out of 5]

No está mal el libro pero claro la primera parte estuvo increíble.