Conference noted::sf

    I haven't read STARQUAKE, though I have read DRAGON'S EGG.
    That *may* indicate something. I thought DE was very long on
    ideas, but very short on characters and writing. Forward
    would've been better off getting a collaborator who had the
    skills to write the story while Forward tossed in the ideas.
    
    He has one other novel (that was published in between these
    two) -- THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY.
    
    --- jerry

    	Forward is also a major proponent of the lightsail starship,
    which would use incredibly powerful lasers positioned on planetoids
    to push a huge (hundreds of kilometers) sail with either a manned
    or unmanned payload to other star systems.  One version of this
    very possible starship can be read in Larry Niven's and Jerry
    Pournelle's THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE.
    
    	Larry
    

    Forward has a new book out called "Future Magic" which is basically
    an expanded version of the Appendices of Dragon's Egg and Starquake.
    All about how to make gravity waves and time machines, etc.
                                                   
                  /
                 (  ___
                  ) ///
                 /
    

    RE .1
    
    I also had something of a difficult time getting through DRAGON'S EGG. 
    STARQUAKE, however, is a much better story.
    
    I saw Dr. Forward on one of those public TV series, explaining black
    holes and neutron stars, just about three weeks ago.  I didn't realize
    till then that he really IS a scientist.  No wonder his ideas were so
    believable.
    
    ... Bob

    Some of you may also have met Dr Forward in Larry Niven's "Borderland
    of Sol" as the villainous Dr Julian Forward. Niven occasionally
    nods to one of his colleagues in this way - but only the very best.
    Another example is Robert Anson in "Footfall" (i.e. Robert Anson
    Heinlein).
    
    Forward stated in an interview I once read that if one of his ideas
    isn't rigorous enough for a scientific paper, he makes a science
    fiction story out of it. That accounts both for the authenticity
    and the lack of characterisation. (To tell the truth, the latter
    doesn't bother me. Lots of great SF writers haven't bothered much
    with people - for example Asimov, Clarke, van Vogt...)
    
    --Tom

    re: .4
    
    Odd, I had the reverse reaction: I found "Starquake" much harder 
    to take than "Dragon's Egg".  By the second novel I was already 
    familiar with the cheela and their world, so it was harder to 
    forgive the cardboard characters.  I gave up on "Starquake" when
    the cheela movie star becomes an immortal love goddess.  I did like
    Forward's means of supporting the space stations, though.  Just fire
    a stream of something into space, catch it on the station, and use
    the momentum gained to stay aloft!  It's like floating a 
    building on a stream of machine gun bullets.

    /jlr

    re .6, suspension by momentum transfer.
    
    It's not original with Forward--there is already a bed which
    works on the same principle (streams of tiny beads hit a 
    thick sheet, holding it up) used for burn patients.  I believe
    it may predate the waterbed!
    
    			-John Bishop

    Forward has a new book out, something about a revolution on Mars.  has
    anyone read it, and is it as  good as his other books?  I've always
    liked his books because they are the hardest of hard-SF (what do you
    expect from a physicist?), and have spaceships and other high-tech toys
    that actually work, but the blurb I read in IASFM didn't mention
    much about hardware.
    
    Willie

    
    If I remember aright (which I may not), it was reviewd in The
    New York Times Review of Books last Sunday. The reviewer didn't
    like it--he thought the characters were wooden and the dialogue
    was stiff. Didn't say anything about the hardware. (The reviewer
    did say that in Forward's last book the creatures were more interest-
    ing than the humans...)

    re .9 - the reference to the aliens could be to either the Cheela (see
    earlier replies on Dragon's Egg/Starquake) or to the aliens in "Flight
    of the Dragonfly".  BTW, the latter has been reissued (under a new
    title which escapes me just now) in "unedited" form.
    
    len.
    

    RE .10
    
    The Cheela could not have been more interesting than humans ... they
    were essentially human in every way except physically.  This was one
    big disappointment to me in Dragon's Egg/Starquake.  How would a race
    that evolved in such a different environment come to have such human
    characteristics?
    
    ... Bob
    

    Argue with the Times' reviewer?  Maybe he/she/it meant the underwater
    folk from Flight of the Dragonfly.
    
    len.
    

    re:.9
    
    	� The reviewer didn't like it--he thought the characters
    	were wooden and the dialogue was stiff. �
    
    To be more precise, this is what he (Gerald Jonas) said:
    
    	"To call the dialogue wooden is to insult the
    	expressive potential of a tree stump."
    
    --- jerry

    Yes, but does it have rivets?  I hope it's not like Asimov's Nemesis,
    where it looks like he decided to ignore all that science stuff and
    work on his characterization (and failed miserably, IMHO).
    
    Willie

    re .10 - The reissued "fully restored" (and apparently somewhat
    rewritten) version of "Flight of the Dragonfly" is called "RocheWorld"
    and the aliens are called flouwen.
    
    len.
    

Article: 526
From: Humphrey Aaron V <dg-rtp!amisk.cs.ualberta.ca!aaron>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: Retrograde Reviews--Robert L. Forward:Starquake
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 16:46:25 GMT
Organization: not specified
 
[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
 
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