Erik's Reviews > Dragon's Egg

Essentially, pure science fiction. It's about how life might arise on the surface of a neutron star and how that civilization might evolve.

That's it. The end. It doesn't arbitrarily shoehorn in modern elements of the political conversation. It doesn't try to wax poetical with lyrical prose. Hell, it doesn't really even have character arcs in the typical sense. Nor much suspense, for that matter.

It's been called hard sci-fi, but I can't say I agree, at least not in the sense of "hard" sci-fi being "hard to understand." I don't think there's any explicit math and a minimum of explicit science. Rather we might say it's all "based on science."

Overall, I give it 3 stars, simply because this is not the first book I've read that follows the evolution of an alien civilization. My favorite sci-fi author - Greg Egan - has several books (Incandescence, Diaspora, Orthogonal Series) that do much the same. Compared to those books, Dragon's Egg is like a child's crayon drawing compared to a van Gogh painting. Or, perhaps a better analogy, is that Dragon's Egg feels like the cliff-notes version, whereas Egan gets into the scientific, social, and mathematical nitty-gritty detail.

That said, my experience is that an extremely limited number of people can appreciate an Egan book. This one, while still more difficult than your average novel, is vastly more approachable and therefore much more appropriate for your typical sci-fi reader. It's not about what you're capable of understanding, though; it's about what you're capable of enjoying. Not everyone - even if they understand it - enjoys a book that is heavy on technical detail. If that's you, Dragon's Egg might be the better read.