Does anyone remember the title and/or author of a sci-fi book about single-celled organisms that ended up saving the life of some astronauts? The organisms launched a mission into space and fixed something in the astronauts spaceship. The book dealt extensively with the concept that time passes much more quickly for single-celled organisms. I read it in 1984.
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Sounds like Robert L. Forward's 1980 novel Dragon's Egg and its 1985 sequel Starquake, about human astronauts studying a neutron star which has been discovered close to the Solar System, and finding that it is inhabited by beings called the cheela who live about a million times as fast as we do. I'm not sure they are really "single-celled" but they are quite tiny, although about as massive as a human because of their great density.
The cheela do "launch a mission into space and fix something in the astronauts' spaceship", but that's in the sequel. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Starquake:
This story begins at the exact time that Dragon's Egg (its predecessor) ended, picking up the plot perfectly. As the human scientists in the orbiting ship Dragon Slayer prepare to leave, the Cheela on the star below continue their rapid advance. Starquake centers around two crises. The first is when the human ship is damaged, and the Cheela must repair the ship before tidal forces kill the humans aboard. Then a catastrophic Starquake strikes. Cheela explorers in space survive but have lost the technology to land back on the surface of their world.
Dragon's Egg and Starquake have been published in a single volume.
answered Apr 23, 2014 at 8:27
