 John Pierce also regarded Dragon 's Egg as hard science fiction at its best , while Forward 's later novel Martian Rainbow ( 1991 ) was the genre at its worst . Both novels have cardboard human characters , but this does not matter in Dragon 's Egg , where the focus is on the deeper personalities of the cheela characters . The novel even makes readers care about the fate of an unsympathetic cheela ruler , whose rejuvenation treatment fails catastrophically . Pierce wrote that the best works of this genre create a literary experience , but one of an unusual kind . Instead of offering a metaphor for a reality the reader already recognizes , they create new realities in which the reader is caught up . 
