
Life on a neutron star (2004) - che_shr_cat
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstarlife.html
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Zanni
I love these books (Dragon's Egg and Starquake). Robert Forward isn't great
with the human characters, but they're only in a handful of scenes. He really
brings the cheela to life, and the speculative physics is outstanding.

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arethuza
I remember some wit commenting that the strangest aliens in science fiction
were the human characters in a Robert Forward novel...

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vbuwivbiu
also Flux
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_\(novel\))
by Stephen Baxter

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arethuza
That also adds the interesting aspect of _weaponized_ neutron stars...

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pavel_lishin
For those who haven't read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels, a
weaponized neutron star is actually fairly tame as far as weapons go in that
series.

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fractallyte
Before this, there was Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity))

He even wrote an article about the creation of his high-g planet, featured in
Astounding SF in 1953.

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JoeAltmaier
As a kid, I read Hal Clement. He was lauded as one of the few authors to write
aliens as alien. They had different goals. This was refreshing after so many
1-dimension aliens, or aliens who were just humans in a different guise.

Actually even as a kid I didn't think he'd gone far enough. Sure they had
different outlooks. But fundamentally there weren't as different from me as
some other people I knew. I was wishing for an alien that thought completely
differently - different morals, different logic, different cultural blind
spots and esthetics. Not just different solutions to obstacles they found,
which they could explain in perfect western logic.

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Iwan-Zotow
> I was wishing for an alien that thought completely differently - different
> morals, different logic, different cultural blind spots and esthetics.

"Solaris" by S.Lem

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lostmsu
Wouldn't enormous gravitational pressure on the surface of neutron star
essentially make it extremely flat (as in nearly perfect elongated sphere)?

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wcoenen
According to this article by David Darling, any surface irregularities
("mountains") would be no more than 5 mm in height.

[http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html](http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html)

Charles Horowitz estimates 100 mm.

[https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-
steel...](https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel.html)

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zelos
They can also have 'seas' of hydrogen pulled off a partner star if they're in
a binary system. The resulting occasional thermonuclear explosions might make
it a bit of an unpleasant place to live though.

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jerf
The novel occurs on a free-roaming neutron star that has stabilized enough due
to its isolation to permit life. Along with the open question of whether
"nuclear chemistry" is possible, it would certainly be an open question as to
whether it is truly possible for a neutron star to ever stabilize enough for
life. I don't think it's much of a spoiler since it's right in the title...
the second one, Starquake, centers around a neutron-star quake that happens to
the Cheela civilization. Neutron star quakes are so devastating that the human
ships and the humans are quite badly shaken up, merely being in orbit around a
neutron quake. (Imagine satellites being destroyed because of a quake on
Earth. We're very low mass, we don't think of things like that. Though I'm
sure we can tell the differences in some trajectories from quakes and
seaslides.)

