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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The Science of Spider Star
March 7th, 2008
“A dark-matter world holds the key to a weapon from the heart of a sun.”
That’s the tagline on the cover. My new hard science fiction novel, Spider Star, was published by Tor this week. I’m pretty happy to finally have the book out, the current expression of my attempts to make my career in astronomy and my interest in writing synergistic.
I wanted to make a very general post highlighting a few of the key sciences/technologies I featured in the novel. In coming days/weeks, I’ll have some more specific posts discussing each of these in more detail.
Stellar Evolution. The story begins on a planet called Argo in orbit around the star Pollux. Pollux is an evolved giant star. The ancient extinct aliens that once inhabited Argo somehow moved their planet as Pollux evolved off the main sequence into a giant. Getting the timescales right and making them work for this was a little tricky (I recommend StarClock as a great tool!). The technology of the planet moving is a key plot element.
Dark Matter. I wrote a brief introduction to dark matter and posted it few months back. The Spider Star, and this isn’t much of a spoiler, is a giant alien space station that sits in the gravity well of a dark matter planet. I leaned on some speculative astrophysical papers by theorists David Eichler and Robert Foot for not only inspiration, but actually calculating some of the complicated details of the world building.
Gravity. The planet moving and the details of life in, on, and throughout the Spider Star relies on understanding gravity. I got to have a lot of fun describing how things work in these strange environments. Some of those counter-intuitive freshman physics problems get trotted out and exploited in the story. Travel in the Spider Star is accomplished through evacuated tubes, letting you go from place to place along the travel web in the same 45 minutes, using only gravity, no matter the distance. Local “surface gravity” changes with altitude. And more.
Interstellar Travel. I have a lot of different technologies in the book for dealing with interstellar travel, many I mentioned in a recent post. My favorite one in the book involves dark matter. I invented an alien device called “the Bully” because it pushes WIMPs around for thrust.
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What do you assume that the dark matter is, in your novel? Just curious. Personally I hope that dark matter particles will be majorana (their own antiparticles), so that they annihilate when they interact with eachother — that’s a more hopeful scenario for detection. But it also means that dark matter densities cannot get so very high. (Hmm. Maybe I should blog about that some day.)
By the way, since I’m trying to read all novels with dark matter in them, Spider Star is now on my wish list.
I think I’ve got a line in the novel about how some seventeen types of dark matter are known. Many are WIMPs (one type I give the name “aetheron”). I don’t think there’s any reason there has to be only one type of dark matter. There probably does have to be a dominant form with some properties we’re starting to understand. The dark matter planet is based on “mirror matter” (see Robert Foot) and basically serves just as a gravity well of a particular depth and profile.
“The ancient extinct aliens that once inhabited Argo somehow moved their planet as Pollux evolved off the main sequence into a giant.”
You know, most of the discussions I’ve seen about moving planets deals with the relativelty short red giant phase. Has anyone ever had the project last long enough that the star became a white dwarf? WDs take a long, long time to cool off so that phase of the project might be the longest one.
That’s an interesting idea. Stars spend about 90% of their fusion-powered lifetime on the main sequence, and about 10% as a giant star. Then there’s the long death for low-intermediate mass stars not too dissimilar to the sun, as slow-cooling white dwarf stars. There’s the planetary nebula phase, which I think would be very difficult to survive through, as both the expanding shells and the exposed stellar core would be killer. It’s interesting to think about and could make for good reading. I’ve never seen a discussion about planetary survival into this phase. Arthur C. Clark’s “The Star” gets some science wrong, positing a white dwarf star as the product of a supernova and a planet at Pluto-like distances surviving the event. Can’t think of anything else.
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