Life in Hostile Environs part II
I found this interesting sci-fi book a few years ago in a bin of free books at Grant Mac. Called Dragon's Egg, it is a story about what life would look like on a neutron star. The author, Dr. Robert L. Forward, is a gravitational astronomer, so he knows what he's talking about as far as the physics go, and still writes a readable story.
Here is a quick primer on neutron stars, and an artist's rendering. In a nutshell, they are stars in a nutshell (heehee). When a star goes supernova, a neutron star is what is left behind- a massively dense object only a few tens of kilometers in diameter. And not really on fire any more- they have super-smooth surfaces. Dr. Forward's fictional neutron star, Dragon's Egg, is about 20 kms across but has half the mass of the sun. Its surface gravity is 67 billion times that of the Earth's.
The cool thing about the tiny little critters living on Dragon's Egg is that they live at a much faster rate than we do- an hour of our time would be almost two generations of theirs. A typical lifespan is 33 minutes. In the book, our civilizations interacted for 1.2 seconds.