Rocheworld
Powered by a revolutionary laser-driven stardrive, the first interstellar expedition would reach the double planet circling Barnard's Star -- and find a world of wonders and dangers beyond all their imaginings.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
10mentions
10people
2010–2023years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's one of my favorite books.
Another great Forward read is Rocheworld.
Forward was a physicist, and created settings that only a physicist would be likely to think of.
- A similar idea to what was used for travel in the hard sci Fi novel series “Rocheworld” (highly recommended)
- This reminds me of a sci-fi book I read when I was a kid called Rocheworld by Robert Forward.
They were going to the Barnard Star, but it had binary planets where one was all water.
Good book (if I recall)..
- I think all of Robert Forward's stuff would qualify. My favorites are
Rocheworld (AKA The Flight of the Dragonfly) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld
and
Dragon's Egg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
- It's been a long time since I read Foundation, but I'm pretty sure Asimov was too smart to explain how those "ultrawave relays" worked. As a reader I am therefore free to assume that they are based on future physics discoveries (maybe involving wormholes?). That's fine as long as there is no obvious contradiction of known physics.
The really hard way though is to do what Robert Forward did in "Flight of the Dragonfly [1]: it includes 30+ pages and 12 figures with technical details. He worked it all out at the level of a real mission proposal.
- The Seeds of Earth by Michael Cobley, which feels very much like he mashed together a couple of Alan Dean Foster books with an Iain M Banks Culture novel.
A key part of the story takes place on a planet-wide forest with giant trees and a Gaia-like sentience (Midworld), its maguffin is a galaxy-threatening superweapon (The Tar-Aiym Krang), and a significant character is a wise old floating robot/AI that uses fields to manipulate things (Culture drones).
This reminds me of Interstellar, where I recognised the books that the authors had taken their influences from, such as Rocheworld by Robert L. Forward, which also features helpful robots that fold up with arms that have smaller-and-smaller subunits.
