Rocheworld is a series of five books written by physicist Robert L. Forward, with some help from his family and friends.
The series consists of:
- Rocheworld, also known as The Flight of the Dragonfly (1981)
- Return to Rocheworld (1993, with Julie Forward Fuller)
- Marooned on Eden (1993, with Martha Dodson Forward)
- Ocean Under the Ice (1994, with Martha Dodson Forward)
- Rescued from Paradise (1999, with Julie Forward Fuller)
The series details the exploration of the Bardard's Star system, and takes its title from the first planets explored: a binary planet that resembles two eggs with the little ends facing each other. One planet is covered entirely in ocean, the other is a barren wasteland.
The story begins with a lightsail-propelled space probe detecting that the Barnard's Star solar system has something worth looking at. The change of trajectory necessitates that it discard its sail, and it sends a signal back to Earth. The sail itself touches down on the Wet side of Rocheworld, and begins dissolving into its caustic ocean, leaving a gross taste in the water. One of the native inhabitants, a Starfish Alien called a "flouwen," can't figure out how something could come out of the area above the ocean, as it's well known to be vacuum. It soon reasons that there must be something above the sea, and discovers how to "invent" the Eye.
Six years later, the space probe's signal reaches Earth, prompting the government to organize an expedition to the Barnard's Star system.
Examples include:
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The flouwen take a lot of cues from Lovecraft's shoggoths, being gigantic Blob Monsters able to form specialized pseudopods. They have no DNA, with their genetic information directly encoded on the surface of their undifferentiated, silica gel-based cells. Their neurochemistry takes the form of a colored liquid that sloshes around inside their bodies. They can, at will, increase their brainpower by squeezing all the water out of their bodies, which they do to think really hard about things. They're biologically immortal, but eventually "die" by permanently withdrawing into themselves to ponder extremely difficult math problems. They are eventually eroded away entirely if they don't figure it out in time.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Flowen mate by gathering in a group of three or more (we see four) mingling their biomass and withdrawing the colored liquid that forms their neurochemistry, then pinching off the now-clear glob of tissue, which slowly settles on a personality and color over the course of 30 seconds or so.
- Cute Machines:
- The Prometheus's AI communicates through a "Christmas Bush," which is made up mostly of fibre-optics, making it look very pretty indeed. The bush acts as its hands and user interface.
- Various AI probes have cheery personalities and love their jobs.
- Fan Dis Service:
- Old-people sex, during which one of them dies.
- Graphic rape, from the victim's POV.
- Fanservice:
- We get to see the crew have sex together at various points.
- There's a zero-G ballet that involves a woman in a very skimpy hummingbird costume.
- Fantastic Naming Convention: Flowen names are taken from 1) their flavour, 2) their color, and 3) the overtone of their voice in any organization plus a unique dingbat, leading to names like "Roaring☆Hot☆Vermillion." Animals get an adjective, an ×, and a sound, like the Big×Boom, an ambush predator that hunts by exploding peices of its body to stun prey.
- Male Gaze: The very first landmark found on the wet side of the Rocheworld is a dormant volcano that looks like a gigantic breast. It was, of course, noticed by one of the male explorers.
- Inventor of the Mundane: The series starts with a flouwen named Clear◇White◇Whistle inventing sight, by selectively thickening and clearing its body mass to make an eyeball, focusing light onto a body usually only able to vaguely discern light, dark, and broad colors. It then immediately invents astronomy.
- Nuclear Torch Rocket: The series has torch engines become viable after the crew of the Solar Sail ship Prometheus discovers a high-temperature superconductor on an ice planet of the Barnard's Star system (the aliens native to the planet utilize it biologically in their nerves, if you were wondering) which would allow fusion plasma to be controlled without the magnets losing their, ah, magnetism due to overheating. Earth's government launches a followup mission to the Barnard's Star system that takes a fraction of the time it took the Promethius with a solar sail, but the torch ship still gets there just as the last of the Prometheus's old crew all die of old age.
- Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: The crew takes a life-extending drug called "No-Die," which regresses them to the brainpower of six-year old children thanks to their genius intellect. One character's average IQ is reduced to the brainpower of a two-year old, endlessly watching a screensaver of a whale breaching over and over.
- Solar Sail: Earth's government maintains a fleet of solar-sailing ships, with a series of satellites around the sun that concentrate its light into a boosting laser.
- Soviet Superscience: China claims to have invented a variant of No-Die that doesn't lobotomize its users.
- Starfish Aliens: Almost every planet of the Barnard's Star system is populated by sapient aliens, none of which are humanoid.
- The Flouwen of the Wet side of Rocheworld, Eau, which are extremely intelligent slimes whose hobbies include surfing and advanced mathematics
- The Gummies of the Dry side of Rocheworld, Roche, are semisolid cousins of the Flowen, and resemble giant, technicolor starfish.
- The Jollies (named for their boisterous "Ho ho ho!" laughter, which reminded a crewmember of the Jolly Green Giant) who live on one of the gas giant's moons take many cues from Treeants, and have symbiotic animals that act as eyes and hands.
- The Mats in Ocean Under the Ice are huge swathes of Meat Moss forming a "foot," with the body being little more than a pillar surmounted by an eye. They are the female half of a species with Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism; the males look like sharks. Once the sharks become fertile, they commit suicide by swimming into a geyser and get blasted skyward, to splatter against the ice. When one of the mats find a shark, they eat the cysts that formed in the shark's cheeks, which fertilize them. Being monotremes, this manifests as a bout of the trots, with larvae being excreted instead of, well, excrement. As the shark's carcasse rots, it provides nutrients for a single Mat larvae, which grows up to be a wildling unless adopted by one of the tribes.
- Starfish Language: The Flouwen use sonar pulses to communicate, and use their unique dingbats as quotation marks.
- Starfish Robots: The Prometheus's AI operates an armitage called a "Christmas Bush,'' a Do-Anything Robot that consists of many tiny modules that communicate with color-coded light beams. It resembles a cross between a Giant Spider, a stick bug, and a christmas tree.
- Stations of the Canon: The series seems written with an eye towards jumping in at any point. The first quarter of each book is about the crew being assigned to the Prometheus for the expedition, then there's a unique storyline about a crewmember, then the storyline about an outbreak of Hodgkin's Lymphoma when everyone's on No-Die, and then we finally get to the storyline about the aliens of whatever planet is being explored. The final chapter is always about the last 3 crewmembers of the Prometheus and how they become the last two crewmembers.
- The Topic of Cancer: The third storyline of each book is about the Heroic Sacrifice of one of the crew to treat the others for virally-induced Hodgkin's Lymphoma. His eventually kills him, because he cannot operate on himself.
- Translator Microbes: Well, not so much microbes. Prometheus provides a running translation, using modules from the Christmas Bush as headsets to facilitate communication between the humans and aliens.
- World Shapes: The emponymous Rocheworld, which looks like two eggs pointed at each other. Under certain conditions, the sea of one can slosh over and flood the wasteland of the other, which happens semi-regularly.
