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Camelot 30K is a science-fiction novel by Robert L. Forward.

A Kuiper Belt object is discovered in 1998, and a space probe is sent past it. Impossibly, there appears to be life on it—and what is more, at least some of it appears to be intelligent! Another probe is sent and establishes first contact with Merlene, the self-described Wizard of the city of Camalor. Camalor is one of the many cities that the keracks (their autonym) have established on Ice (their name for 1998 ZX). Eventually, a manned expedition is sent out to Ice so that the humans may have a more direct interaction with the keracks. The book is an explanation of the science and the sociology of both the keracks and the humans.

Not to be confused with Camelot 3000.

Camelot 30K provides examples of the following tropes:

  • Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Subverted. Trouble crops up because the philistine humans only think they appreciate the alien arts properly.
  • Alien Blood: It's yellowish, and when it's heated up to anywhere near Earth-like temperatures it explodes. This is because it's made of oxygen difluoride rather than water, and has a boiling point far colder than the coldest Antarctic winter.
  • All There In The Appendices: There's a bit of an Info Dump after the end of the story.
  • And the Adventure Continues: For Merlene, Hiroshi, and the cat anyway. They can't go home (it blew up, he has heart issues, and it grew up accustomed to space), so they go on.
  • Bittersweet Ending: So Camalor basically nuked itself out of existence in the name of an evolutionary imperative, Hiroshi can't go home again because if he does the stress will kill him, the ship's cat isn't used to Earth gravity so she can't either, and Merlene is all alone…but the other humans are still able to go home, and Hiroshi and Merlene are willing to try and stop the keracks from proceeding with their standard reproductive behaviors again.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: The fact that each kerack has a "soul" of uranium is just the tip of the iceberg…
  • Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Basically, every single form of life on Ice is a variant of the same gene, and they all unknowingly work in concert to construct a freaking nuclear warhead to spread the lifeforms all across outer space.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Of a sort, though by the end of the book it seems that the humans might be well on their way to converting some or all of the keracks.
  • Bland-Name Product:
    • The Lookman, which is sort of an offline smartphone.
    • The Encyclopedia Terra Digital brings to mind the Encyclopedia Britannica.
  • Cassandra Truth: Merlene is made aware of the mechanism by which life on Ice makes a big nuclear bomb in the name of species-wide reproduction. The royalty rebuff it and end up causing the events to happen—it's possible that they shot Merlene down on purpose to prevent the masses from trying to stop it.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Literally every single facet of life on Ice. The various element-spewing grubs, the uranium "souls", the construction of the temple, the royalty's pets…everything works in concert to effect the reproduction of the species by starting a runaway nuclear reaction.
  • Expy: Arthurian legend, life, and times at a temperature of thirty degrees Kelvin—hence the title, Camelot 30K. It is set in (Camalor/Camelot), (Merlin/Merlene) is the wizard. There's also (Laslot/Lancelot), among others. There's plenty of dances, a royal caste system, the state religion, artisans, farmers, the beginnings of science, skirmishes and battles for no good reason…
  • Heroic BSoD: Merlene suffers from one after Camalor explodes, killing all of its keracks, including her loved ones.
  • Hive Mind: All the keracks in a given city form one. One can even force the creation of a memory and extract such memories from the collective if the person who implanted the memory died. Wander too far from the city and you lose access until you return.
  • Idiot Ball: The scientists and engineers for the mission seem to have used these as bearings. One of the characters managed to smuggle a cat onboard the spacecraft, and nobody noticed. This may not sound like much, but a little mass goes a long, long way in space, especially when you're trying to travel from the Earth to the outer edges of the solar system. Even shuttle-era launch protocols should've caught on to the cat's presence.
  • Info Dump: Dr. Forward explains quite a bit in the main text, to say nothing of the appendices.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The humans give Merlene learning resources, which she uses to design a form of crossbow that slaughters the army of the nearby city of Harvamor.
  • Really 700 Years Old: Discussed by the humans as to how little sense it made for the keracks to all live for so long. Justifed by the end of the book.
  • Shown Their Work: The author holds a doctorate, and no detail has been spared in the design and description of Ice and its inhabitants.
  • Solid Gold Poop: And solid silver, and solid platinum, et multa cetera
  • Starfish Aliens: The keracks, definitely, being as they are essentially cryogenic mantis shrimp that live on a ball of ice farther from the Sun than Neptune.
  • Wham Line: Notable for its context, wherein Camalor is about to nuke itself out of existence in an effort to continue the existence of a genetic lineage:
    Rexart: You have no soul!
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The ending of the book is in large part an exploration of this question with reference to science and a Blue-and-Orange Morality.
  • You Can't Go Home Again: By book's end:
    • Hiroshi. The stress of launch killed him once; his ticker couldn't take it a second time.
    • Lucifer, the ship's cat. It grew up in an environment with less gravity than Earth's and spent so long there that it wouldn't have been able to reädjust.
    • Merlene. Camalor is a crater, the Hive Mind she was a part of is gone, her friends and relatives are dead, the humans are (mostly) going back to earth.
  • Your Head Asplode: Or your body, if you're a kerack and you let the uranium pellet that your body contains heat your blood up too much. Turns out, there's a reason for that feature.
  • Your Normal Is Our Taboo:
    • For the keracks, it's humans' continually uncovered mouths. Human mouths don't house reproductive organs.
    • For the humans, it is the openness with which the keracks defecate. If the door's closed, it's because of the odor, not because of modesty.

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