Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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One Thing Wrong with most Space Movies
February 7th, 2008
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams There’s not a lot of science in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it’s a fantastic book, and the quote above is quite correct.
But did you ever notice how many movies or TV shows have people/aliens/robots jump into spaceships with rocket thrusters and be able to travel between planets in a few minutes (hours or days at most), or even between entire stars without even a mild, appeasing nod toward hyperspace or faster-than-light travel?
The new Battlestar Galactica series does pretty well with some of its science, but not on this point. Rocket-propelled Vipers and Raptors can search an entire solar system worth of planets and asteroids in a few hours. I do like that the battles take place at high speed, although I’m not sure we should even see the enemy visually at the speeds these ships must travel.
In Enemy Mine, there is apparently interplanetary space travel, if not interstellar space travel, for one-man (Drak?) ships on some quite short time scale. The meteors also hit pretty damn slowly for something that should be traveling at kilometers per second.
In The Empire Strikes Back, we have Luke in an X-wing travel to the Dagobah system also in a few hours (if not, where does he pee?), without any evidence for hyperspace capability. In the Star Wars universe, it seems any child with a few hours to spare can cobble together a bicycle capable of near instantaneous interstellar flight.
Star Trek also commits the sin of faster-than-light ships, but is at least consistent with their warp speeds and the travel time between stars and different parts of the galaxy (although how you split a galaxy into “quadrants” is a little unclear to me). This was even a major plot element for Voyager since at top speed it would still take them many decades to make it home. Big props for understanding how big space is even with ludicrous warp speeds.
There are a few terrific exceptions. 2001 comes to mind, with the multi-year trip to Jupiter requiring cryogenic suspension for the astronauts. But most movies/TV shows just absolutely suck on this point. Too slow, I imagine a director or producer saying. Does it really matter? People don’t want to think.
I do, and I don’t believe I’m alone.
Relativity pretty much never even rears its interesting but complicated head in a TV show or movie. It would be interesting to see this handled well in more than a single Twilight Zone episode. The model everyone has for space is boats in the ocean, which is a tiny drop in a bucket with nothing like the right relative distances or speeds compared to space.
Vastly, hugely, mind-boggling big space.
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One of the better space shows recently (even if the ending was a bit lame) was the anime Starship Operators. Although it had BSG-style jump drives, the actual battles in space were much truer to physics, trying (for example) to explain to the audience how one targeted and “led” a fast-as-light weapon to ensure that the beam and the target would be in the same place in a battlefield light-minutes across. In many ways, the show was an attempt to “fix” the bad science of classic anime like Starship Yamato.
There’s also a screamingly funny scene where the captain of a new starship, about to fire the ship’s spinal cannon for the first time, runs through the EULA (written in English) checking off all the things he indemnifies the shipyard against and takes responsibility for himself.
(The entire premise of the show is so damn good, it’s a pity it’ll probably never be available in the US.)
That sounds interesting, and it sounds like anime has continued to evolve quite a bit since the last time I watched a large amount of it (late 1990s, not counting Dragonball Z which is a guilty pleasure and not exactly the best anime out there).
“…sounds like anime has continued to evolve quite a bit since the last time I watched a large amount of it (late 1990s, not counting Dragonball Z which is a guilty pleasure and not exactly the best anime out there).”
I’d recommend “Cowboy Bebop”!
Mixed in with the over-the-top animé physics are some decent attempts at real-world physics, particularly in microgravity.
Plus, the music’s amazing!
I’ve heard of Cowboy Bebop and will look for it when I have the opportunity.