Rocheworld
Encyclopedia
Rocheworld is a science fiction
novel by Robert Forward
in which he uses a light sail propulsion system to set the crew on an interstellar mission. The spaceship and crew of 20 have to travel 5.9 light-years (ca. 34 trillion miles; ca. 56 trillion km) to the double planet
that orbits Barnard's Star
, which they call Rocheworld.
Its sequels include Return to Rocheworld
, Marooned on Eden
, Ocean Under the Ice, and Rescued from Paradise.
A fraction of the crew visit the double planet
Rocheworld, landing on the water-free lobe, dubbed Roche (French for rock as well as the name of the French mathematician who worked on Roche limit
s). After exploring Roche, they again split up, and one group journeys via the space-plane Dragonfly to the other lobe, Eau (French for water), which is covered almost entirely by ocean. The crew are caught in a violent storm that causes their plane to experience a crash water-landing. The flooded propulsion systems of the space-plane are unable to provide enough thrust to break free and take off from the ocean surface. The crew decide to use the plane's lift fans as propellers to make their way to the inner pole of the double planet, where the gravitation
from the other lobe of the double planet should help them to break free and allow rendezvous with the remaining crew in the lander at the zero point between the two lobes.
While making this journey, the space-plane attracts the attention of one of the native species of the planet: the very intelligent, but technologically lacking, Flouwen. The Flouwen and the artificial intelligence aboard the space-plane establish communications and the two species begin to exchange cultural and scientific knowledge.
The Flouwen realize the humans are travelling to the pole and warn the humans that they are approaching a period where the configuration of the star and planets of the system allow for a phenomenon where the ocean on the water lobe of Rocheworld can partially flow to the rocky lobe, due to the change in the gravitational equipotential. They try to stop the humans from continuing into this violent event by pinning the spacecraft to the ammonia-water ocean floor with ice as ballast (water ice sinks in the less dense ammonia-water solution of the ocean). However, the humans realize that the interplanetary waterfall poses a threat to the crew remaining on Roche. Fortunately, the tidal stresses cause nearby dormant volcanoes to become active again. This melts an underwater glacier and floods the area with warm water, upon which the ice floats off the plane. The crew manages to get airborne and takes advantage of the changing equipotential to return to Roche. They rendezvous with the lander just as water is reaching it.
, a large focusing lens, and a giant space-sail. The idea behind the solar sail
is that the laser provides a small force on the sail when the sail reflects the light. This small force provides the acceleration of the spaceship. With the ship's primary source of energy coming from the outside, it would not be limited to traveling distances that it had enough fuel for.
The light used in the system was an array of a thousand laser generators, which were focused through lenses and aimed at the sail. The lasers provided up to 1,500 terawatts of power. Two different lenses were used to magnify the laser beams. The acceleration lens was 100 km in diameter and was able to accelerate the ship at 0.01g; the deceleration lens was 300 km in diameter and was able to decelerate the ship at 0.1g. Although these accelerations are relatively small, over time they result in enormous speeds.
To catch the energy, Forward used a 1,000-km-diameter, circular aluminum sail. The sail resembled a flattened doughnut with the doughnut hole visible but still intact. That is, the 300-km center sail could be separated from the outer as needed. When traveling to Rocheworld, the entire sail was used. When the ship needed to decelerate, the smaller sail was separated from the larger outer sail. The large sail focused the light onto the smaller sail, which “applied the brakes”, so to speak.
Using the Light-Sail Propulsion system, the spaceship Prometheus continued to accelerate for 20 years, traveling 2 light years
' distance toward Barnard's Star before going into coast mode and traveling an additional 20 years' time at a constant speed of .2 c
, covering the remaining 4 light years (ca. 23 trillion miles; 38 trillion km). The crew used a drug called "No-Die" which slowed their aging process, and arrived only a decade physically older than when they left.
but is also French for "rock", so "eau", French for "water", is chosen as the name of the water planet.) Flouwen are blob-like, happy-go-lucky aliens that spend their days surfing waves and working on difficult mathematical problems.
Flouwen appear to be giant, colored jellyfish
in the ammonia oceans of Eau. Like Earthly jellyfish, they are amorphous, colored blobs of jelly. Texture and form, however, are where the similarities end. Flouwen are highly intelligent, sexless, and do not appear to physically age. They are able to communicate and see in the water by means of sonar
. They are also able to see outside the water by morphing their jelly bodies into crude lenses, which they use to methodically track the stars. Flouwen are also capable of morphing themselves into a hard, rock-like substance when they feel the need to think about a difficult problem for an extended period. They do this by excreting much of their body water, thereby bringing their silica-gel-based cells closer together, which allows quicker processing of information.
Flouwen can grow quite large over time. This excess bulk can be shed during a peculiar breeding ritual where large flouwen gather in a circle and spin off pieces of themselves to create a new flouwen. Because they are created out of indistinguishable pieces of their parents, they are born fairly intelligent. One of the aliens, Warm@Amber@Resonance, is said to be over five hundred Eau seasons in age. Warm@Amber@Resonance refers to other flouwen that are much older than it, such as Sour#Sapphire#Coo.
Flouwen possess mathematical abilities far exceeding our own. Despite their intellect, they lack any desire to make real use of it, other than to work on math problems or to study the stars; they just don't see the point in studying anything else. They do not have any concept of technology. They refer to the spaceship Dragonfly as a 'giant talking rock' or "Floating Rock".
Flouwen do not appear to have a strong social structure. They tend to, for the most part, treat one another equally. However, knowledge in mathematics appears to cause an exception to this tendency. Indirectly, age tends to be a factor in this as well. Mathematics
is one of the few subjects in which flouwen show interest and concern. While younger flouwen seem to have lots of free time to spend doing whatever their hearts desire, their elders spend long periods of time in rock form, contemplating and solving mathematical problems. As a result, the older flouwen often hold higher social status as a result of their perceived higher knowledge in mathematics.
Although flouwen do not seem to physically age, they reveal that it's possible that their ages are reflected in the amount of time they spend contemplating in rock form. Perhaps the actual population of the flouwen is much larger than it appears, because there are many off working on problems. Some may never find solutions to their problems, so they will never return (thus completing their life cycle). (The flouwens' time to solve a problem is limited because they will slowly weather away as time passes).
in which the two elements are close enough that they share an atmosphere. Each element is also deformed into an egg shape by the gravity of the other.
system, James. The physical extension of James is the Christmas Bush. The Christmas Bush is both a modular robot
and a bush robot
which both communicates through and is powered by a network of laser
transceivers on its body. The Christmas Bush is similar to some recursive
fractal
structures where the large scale shape of the robot is repeated a number of times in progressively smaller size. A main rod divides into six smaller jointed rods which also divide into six. This is repeated again and again so that the Christmas Bush can manipulate both large and small objects. The end of each rod is where the laser transceivers are located. The Christmas Bush nickname for the robot is due to that when all the rods are fully expanded the robot has a bushy texture, and is lit up like a Christmas tree.
Each rod and its children rods can separate from its parent rod and each carry a certain amount of computational power. The Bush or its pieces move by crawling while experiencing acceleration due to gravity or thrust
, or by flying in low gravity environments. To fly, the smallest rods work together like the cilia of single celled organisms to provide thrust in any direction. The cilia also allow James to play audio and record sound through the bush.
The crew all wear a small piece of James near their ear, which allows them to communicate with James and the other crew members. James will always keep some portion of the bush in contact with the crew's skin to allow it to monitor their health by recording their temperature, pulse, etc.
(a publishing line of Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster). A Baen Books
paperback edition in 1985, also titled Flight of the Dragonfly was slightly lengthened. The British version was published by New English Library
in their "SF Master Series" in 1985. A revised and lengthened version was released in 1990 from Baen Books under the original title Rocheworld, marked "At Last The Complete Story!".
Four sequels, written in collaboration with Forward's family members Julie Forward Fuller and Martha Dodson Forward, were published in 1993, 1994, and 1995.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by Robert Forward
Robert Forward
Robert Lull Forward — known as Robert L. Forward — was an American physicist and science fiction writer...
in which he uses a light sail propulsion system to set the crew on an interstellar mission. The spaceship and crew of 20 have to travel 5.9 light-years (ca. 34 trillion miles; ca. 56 trillion km) to the double planet
Double planet
In astronomy, double planet and binary planet are informal terms used to describe a binary system of two astronomical objects that each satisfy the definition of planet and that are near enough to each other to have a significant gravitational effect on each other compared with the effect of the...
that orbits Barnard's Star
Barnard's star
Barnard's Star, also known occasionally as Barnard's "Runaway" Star, is a very low-mass red dwarf star approximately six light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus . In 1916, the American astronomer E.E...
, which they call Rocheworld.
Its sequels include Return to Rocheworld
Return to Rocheworld
Return to Rocheworld is a 1993 science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward and Julie Forward Fuller. It is the sequel to Forward's Rocheworld Return to Rocheworld is a 1993 science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward and Julie Forward Fuller. It is the sequel to Forward's Rocheworld Return to...
, Marooned on Eden
Marooned on Eden
Marooned on Eden , is a science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward and Margaret Dodson Forward. It is part of the Rocheworld series, about an expedition to explore planets found in orbit around Barnard's Star. It was written before Ocean Under the Ice, but is after it in the continuity...
, Ocean Under the Ice, and Rescued from Paradise.
Plot
In Rocheworld, a small group of civilian and military personnel crew humanity's first manned exploration of another star system. Using a laser-pumped light sail spacecraft, the journey to their destination of Barnard's star lasted 40 years. The crew used a drug called "No-Die" which slowed their aging process, whilst proportionately lowering their effective I.Q., and arrived only a decade physically older than when they left.A fraction of the crew visit the double planet
Double planet
In astronomy, double planet and binary planet are informal terms used to describe a binary system of two astronomical objects that each satisfy the definition of planet and that are near enough to each other to have a significant gravitational effect on each other compared with the effect of the...
Rocheworld, landing on the water-free lobe, dubbed Roche (French for rock as well as the name of the French mathematician who worked on Roche limit
Roche limit
The Roche limit , sometimes referred to as the Roche radius, is the distance within which a celestial body, held together only by its own gravity, will disintegrate due to a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction...
s). After exploring Roche, they again split up, and one group journeys via the space-plane Dragonfly to the other lobe, Eau (French for water), which is covered almost entirely by ocean. The crew are caught in a violent storm that causes their plane to experience a crash water-landing. The flooded propulsion systems of the space-plane are unable to provide enough thrust to break free and take off from the ocean surface. The crew decide to use the plane's lift fans as propellers to make their way to the inner pole of the double planet, where the gravitation
Gravitation
Gravitation, or gravity, is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass. Gravitation is most familiar as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped...
from the other lobe of the double planet should help them to break free and allow rendezvous with the remaining crew in the lander at the zero point between the two lobes.
While making this journey, the space-plane attracts the attention of one of the native species of the planet: the very intelligent, but technologically lacking, Flouwen. The Flouwen and the artificial intelligence aboard the space-plane establish communications and the two species begin to exchange cultural and scientific knowledge.
The Flouwen realize the humans are travelling to the pole and warn the humans that they are approaching a period where the configuration of the star and planets of the system allow for a phenomenon where the ocean on the water lobe of Rocheworld can partially flow to the rocky lobe, due to the change in the gravitational equipotential. They try to stop the humans from continuing into this violent event by pinning the spacecraft to the ammonia-water ocean floor with ice as ballast (water ice sinks in the less dense ammonia-water solution of the ocean). However, the humans realize that the interplanetary waterfall poses a threat to the crew remaining on Roche. Fortunately, the tidal stresses cause nearby dormant volcanoes to become active again. This melts an underwater glacier and floods the area with warm water, upon which the ice floats off the plane. The crew manages to get airborne and takes advantage of the changing equipotential to return to Roche. They rendezvous with the lander just as water is reaching it.
Forward's Light-Sail Propulsion System
The light-sail system consists of three functional parts: a powerful laserLaser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...
, a large focusing lens, and a giant space-sail. The idea behind the solar sail
Solar sail
Solar sails are a form of spacecraft propulsion using the radiation pressure of light from a star or laser to push enormous ultra-thin mirrors to high speeds....
is that the laser provides a small force on the sail when the sail reflects the light. This small force provides the acceleration of the spaceship. With the ship's primary source of energy coming from the outside, it would not be limited to traveling distances that it had enough fuel for.
The light used in the system was an array of a thousand laser generators, which were focused through lenses and aimed at the sail. The lasers provided up to 1,500 terawatts of power. Two different lenses were used to magnify the laser beams. The acceleration lens was 100 km in diameter and was able to accelerate the ship at 0.01g; the deceleration lens was 300 km in diameter and was able to decelerate the ship at 0.1g. Although these accelerations are relatively small, over time they result in enormous speeds.
To catch the energy, Forward used a 1,000-km-diameter, circular aluminum sail. The sail resembled a flattened doughnut with the doughnut hole visible but still intact. That is, the 300-km center sail could be separated from the outer as needed. When traveling to Rocheworld, the entire sail was used. When the ship needed to decelerate, the smaller sail was separated from the larger outer sail. The large sail focused the light onto the smaller sail, which “applied the brakes”, so to speak.
Using the Light-Sail Propulsion system, the spaceship Prometheus continued to accelerate for 20 years, traveling 2 light years
Light Years
Light Years is the seventh studio album by Australian recording artist Kylie Minogue. It was released on 25 September 2000 by Parlophone and Mushroom Records. The album's style was indicative of her return to "mainstream pop dance tunes"....
' distance toward Barnard's Star before going into coast mode and traveling an additional 20 years' time at a constant speed of .2 c
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
, covering the remaining 4 light years (ca. 23 trillion miles; 38 trillion km). The crew used a drug called "No-Die" which slowed their aging process, and arrived only a decade physically older than when they left.
Flouwen
Flouwen (the Middle English word for 'flow') are the alien creatures in the book. They are the sole inhabitants of the planet Eau, which makes up the watery half of Rocheworld; Roche is the dry, rocky half. (The two are so close that they share a common atmosphere, and all the moisture has settled on the smaller Eau side. The name "Roche" is a reference to Édouard RocheÉdouard Roche
Édouard Albert Roche was a French astronomer and mathematician, who is best known for his work in the field of celestial mechanics...
but is also French for "rock", so "eau", French for "water", is chosen as the name of the water planet.) Flouwen are blob-like, happy-go-lucky aliens that spend their days surfing waves and working on difficult mathematical problems.
Flouwen appear to be giant, colored jellyfish
Jellyfish
Jellyfish are free-swimming members of the phylum Cnidaria. Medusa is another word for jellyfish, and refers to any free-swimming jellyfish stages in the phylum Cnidaria...
in the ammonia oceans of Eau. Like Earthly jellyfish, they are amorphous, colored blobs of jelly. Texture and form, however, are where the similarities end. Flouwen are highly intelligent, sexless, and do not appear to physically age. They are able to communicate and see in the water by means of sonar
Sonar
Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation to navigate, communicate with or detect other vessels...
. They are also able to see outside the water by morphing their jelly bodies into crude lenses, which they use to methodically track the stars. Flouwen are also capable of morphing themselves into a hard, rock-like substance when they feel the need to think about a difficult problem for an extended period. They do this by excreting much of their body water, thereby bringing their silica-gel-based cells closer together, which allows quicker processing of information.
Flouwen can grow quite large over time. This excess bulk can be shed during a peculiar breeding ritual where large flouwen gather in a circle and spin off pieces of themselves to create a new flouwen. Because they are created out of indistinguishable pieces of their parents, they are born fairly intelligent. One of the aliens, Warm@Amber@Resonance, is said to be over five hundred Eau seasons in age. Warm@Amber@Resonance refers to other flouwen that are much older than it, such as Sour#Sapphire#Coo.
Flouwen possess mathematical abilities far exceeding our own. Despite their intellect, they lack any desire to make real use of it, other than to work on math problems or to study the stars; they just don't see the point in studying anything else. They do not have any concept of technology. They refer to the spaceship Dragonfly as a 'giant talking rock' or "Floating Rock".
Flouwen do not appear to have a strong social structure. They tend to, for the most part, treat one another equally. However, knowledge in mathematics appears to cause an exception to this tendency. Indirectly, age tends to be a factor in this as well. Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
is one of the few subjects in which flouwen show interest and concern. While younger flouwen seem to have lots of free time to spend doing whatever their hearts desire, their elders spend long periods of time in rock form, contemplating and solving mathematical problems. As a result, the older flouwen often hold higher social status as a result of their perceived higher knowledge in mathematics.
Although flouwen do not seem to physically age, they reveal that it's possible that their ages are reflected in the amount of time they spend contemplating in rock form. Perhaps the actual population of the flouwen is much larger than it appears, because there are many off working on problems. Some may never find solutions to their problems, so they will never return (thus completing their life cycle). (The flouwens' time to solve a problem is limited because they will slowly weather away as time passes).
Rocheworld Shape
Rocheworld itself is a double planetDouble planet
In astronomy, double planet and binary planet are informal terms used to describe a binary system of two astronomical objects that each satisfy the definition of planet and that are near enough to each other to have a significant gravitational effect on each other compared with the effect of the...
in which the two elements are close enough that they share an atmosphere. Each element is also deformed into an egg shape by the gravity of the other.
James (The Christmas Bush)
Rocheworld's human explorers are aided by the Dragonfly's artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
system, James. The physical extension of James is the Christmas Bush. The Christmas Bush is both a modular robot
Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics
Modular self-reconfiguring robotic systems or self-reconfigurable modular robots are autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology...
and a bush robot
Bush robot
Bush robots, as envisioned by Hans Moravec, are the ultimate in dexterity and reconfigurability. They earn their nickname from their appearance: bush robots repeatedly branch in a fractal way into trillions of nanoscale fingers...
which both communicates through and is powered by a network of laser
Laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...
transceivers on its body. The Christmas Bush is similar to some recursive
Recursion
Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...
fractal
Fractal
A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...
structures where the large scale shape of the robot is repeated a number of times in progressively smaller size. A main rod divides into six smaller jointed rods which also divide into six. This is repeated again and again so that the Christmas Bush can manipulate both large and small objects. The end of each rod is where the laser transceivers are located. The Christmas Bush nickname for the robot is due to that when all the rods are fully expanded the robot has a bushy texture, and is lit up like a Christmas tree.
Each rod and its children rods can separate from its parent rod and each carry a certain amount of computational power. The Bush or its pieces move by crawling while experiencing acceleration due to gravity or thrust
Thrust
Thrust is a reaction force described quantitatively by Newton's second and third laws. When a system expels or accelerates mass in one direction the accelerated mass will cause a force of equal magnitude but opposite direction on that system....
, or by flying in low gravity environments. To fly, the smallest rods work together like the cilia of single celled organisms to provide thrust in any direction. The cilia also allow James to play audio and record sound through the bush.
The crew all wear a small piece of James near their ear, which allows them to communicate with James and the other crew members. James will always keep some portion of the bush in contact with the crew's skin to allow it to monitor their health by recording their temperature, pulse, etc.
Publication History
Rocheworld was first published in slightly shorter form as a serial in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction magazine in December 1982 through February 1983. (Cover image with illustration by Rick Sternbach available here http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?57087). It won the Analog "Analytical Laboratory" award for Best Serial Novel or Novella in 1983. The first book version, slightly lengthened, came out under the title Flight of the Dragonfly from Timescape BooksTimescape Books
Timescape Books was a science fiction line from Pocket Books operating from 1981 to 1985. Pocket Books is an imprint of Simon and SchusterIt was named after the Gregory Benford novel Timescape, which was not published by the Timescape imprint. The imprint was founded by David G. Hartwell. It...
(a publishing line of Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster). A Baen Books
Baen Books
Baen Books is an American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy...
paperback edition in 1985, also titled Flight of the Dragonfly was slightly lengthened. The British version was published by New English Library
New English Library
The New English Library was a United Kingdom book publishing company, which became an imprint of Hodder Headline.- History :New English Library was created in 1961 by the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles, with the takeover of two small British paperback companies, Ace Books Ltd and Four Square...
in their "SF Master Series" in 1985. A revised and lengthened version was released in 1990 from Baen Books under the original title Rocheworld, marked "At Last The Complete Story!".
Four sequels, written in collaboration with Forward's family members Julie Forward Fuller and Martha Dodson Forward, were published in 1993, 1994, and 1995.
See also
- Barnard's star in fiction
- Roche lobeRoche lobeThe Roche lobe is the region of space around a star in a binary system within which orbiting material is gravitationally bound to that star. If the star expands past its Roche lobe, then the material can escape the gravitational pull of the star. If the star is in a binary system then the material...
for an explanation of the underlying gravitational principle. - Correspondence between Forward and Hans MoravecHans MoravecHans Moravec is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on...
regarding the use of Moravec's bush robot in the novel.