Subject: Retrograde Reviews--Robert L. Forward:Starquake

From: Humphrey Aaron V <dg-rtp!amisk.cs.ualberta.ca!aaron>
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 16:46:25 GMT

[Spoilers for _Starquake_ and _Dragon's Egg_ herein--read with caution]

First off, this is a sequel to _Dragon's Egg_, which I believe was Forward's
first novel.  I'll try to cover that in here as well, even though it's a few
years since I read it...  Robert L. Forward is a respected Ph.D. physicist who
has done a number of papers speculating on physics near neutron stars, black
holes, and such places where physics as we know it is strained to the limit.
A lot of his stuff is extremely speculative, so it's only natural that he move
into SF.

Prose is not his main strength, though.  His characters are extremely wooden,
especially his humans.  His aliens are a lot better.

In _Dragon's Egg_, IIRC, a neutron star was detected entering the vicinity of
the solar system.  A scientific expedition was sent out to investigate it.
(This is a few centuries in the future, btw.)

Unbeknownst to them, life exists on the star.  It is life on an incredibly
small scale, both in time and in space(one "day", or rotation of the neutron
star, is a fifth of a second), but the ecosystem isn't conducive to swift
evolution.  The arrival of the humans changes that, however...

In brief, during the first day of the humans' presence near the star, a race
called the cheela evolve, attain sentience, and develop civilization, in
response to the humans' presence in their sky and some of their laser scanning
probes.

The cheela tend to be more interesting characters than the humans, if only due
to their alienness; the swiftness of their development, in human terms, allows
for a fairly epic scope.  The humans get short shrift because a conversation
between humans takes as long as several years on the neutron star, and they
soon become fairly minor characters...

By the end of _Dragon's Egg_, the cheela have developed a spacefaring
technology, and have sent off probes to explore other neutron stars...

_Starquake_ centers around two major crises.  The first occurs when the
human ship is damaged, and the cheela have to act fast(only a few years, on
their scale)to repair the damage before the humans are ripped apart by tidal
forces.  Then the quake of the title happens.  Suddenly there are only four
cheela left alive on the surface of the star--and quite a few more than that
left in orbit, with no means of descending.  They have to find some means of
returning to the star, and dealing with the barbarian hordes that have sprung
up in the intervening generations...

Like I said, Forward isn't the most gripping writer, but the story of the
cheela is sufficiently interesting to overcome a lot of that drawback, IMHO.
Someone more interested in tech stuff would be absorbed by that, too--I
skimmed the few sections of that that came up.

I'd give it a 6.5/10, a bit more if you're a real Hard SF fan.

%A Forward, Robert L.
%T Starquake
%I Ballantine del Rey
%C New York
%D October 1985
%G ISBN 0-45-31233-3
%P 339 pp.
%S Cheela
%V Book 2
%O Paperback, $5.50 US

--
--Alfvaen(Editor of Communique)
Current Album--The Waterboys:Dream Harder
Current Read--Mike Resnick:Purgatory
"curious george swung down the gorge/the ants took him apart"  --billbill