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