Dragon's Egg — Robert L. Forward

ONCE IN A WHILE, A NOVEL APPEARS THAT HAS EVERYTHING UNIQUE TO SCIENCE FICTION -- A BRILLIANT NEW IDEA HONEST EXTRAPOLATION OF
REAL SCIENCE, A GRIPPING STORY WITH FASCINATING ALIEN CHARACTERS, AND THE INDEFINABLE BUT ESSENTIAL SENSE OF WONDER. SUCH A NOVEL IS ROBERT L FORWARD'S STORY OF LIFE ON A NEUTRON STAR...

Men could never live on such a star; only by the most advanced technology can humans exist in synchronous orbit to observe it. The surface gravity is an incredible sixty-seven billion times that of Earth, with matter so compressed that the mass of a normal star is packed into a crusted sphere only twenty kilometers in diameter. A magnetic field two trillion times that of Earth distorts the nuclei in the crust, and our normal chemical reactions are replaced by neutron reactions.

Yet on that impossible world, men detect intelligent life-the cheela, who live so fast that one of our hours is the equivalent to them of more than a hundred years of human life. And we follow those cheela as they struggle from savagery through the beginnings of agriculture to the discovery of science. In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, we see them establish contact with the humans orbiting above them.

For a time, men are their teachers. For a brief time...