High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dragon`s Egg is a hard science fiction novel written by Robert L. Forward and published in 1980. In the story, Dragon`s Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures that have the volume of sesame seeds and live a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the star from orbit.