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...
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"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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On Stars and Science Fiction
October 14th, 2008
Really interesting stuff on James Nicoll’s blog:
The facts are wrong
Gene Ward Smith asks what looks like a reasonable question on rec.arts.sf.writtenThe actual answer is probably “a bit of both”. Even today it is easy to find an SF author who apparently has no idea about the lifespans of high mass stars – Eric Brown comes to mind – but as someone points out, at least one TV show recommended using named stars in episodes and named stars are almost always high mass/short life stars.
One subthread rapidly turns into “Well, maybe the mass-luminousity relationship is wrong!” argument, which nicely encapsulates something in SF that I will call the SFnal Lysenkoist Tendency: when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science.
Go over there for the discussion. I find this question fascinating, too, and realize that before college-level astronomy I could have been guilty of this error. Natural plug for Launch Pad, of course! When I get next year’s guest instructor lined up the website will get an update with new dates and an application deadline (Feb. or March). Anyway, you can go here — my online resources for writers using astronomy — to get my slides on stars among other things.
And it’s a pet peeve of mine, too, that I hate when people attack pretty good science just because they think it could be wrong even though they have little or no evidence to suggest it. The big bang is an easy target this way, but is an incredibley well supported theory at this point, but I’ve come across quite a few people who reject it out of hand based on nothing. James P. Hogan, for one, if I recall correctly. He’s a smart guy and a capable writer, but seems to have jumped off the cliff of reason into the sea of credulity in recent years. Thinking outside the box is a good thing, but not if that’s all you do all the time.
I think this heretical science phenomenon is interesting and worth more discussion, but perhaps more on a sociological level rather than a scientific one.
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James P. Hogan, for one, if I recall correctly. He’s a smart guy and a capable writer, but seems to have jumped off the cliff of reason into the sea of credulity in recent years.
He’s a Velikovskiite now and a fan of Peter Duesberg. He is also a fan of of Arthur Butz and Mark Weber, which would be why he is on my extremely short list of authors whose work I won’t review for Those Above. I draw the line at holocaust deniers and their ilk.
Yeah, he seems to be going in for anything contrary, no matter how flimsy or awful. I first met him at Armadillocon in the 1990s and he made a decent case for nuclear power and I learned some things that were good to learn. The last time I met him, I was moderating a science panel at a Worldcon (LA, I think) and he was on the panel. Every time he got a chance to speak, it was to push how some tiny fringe result that wasn’t yet verified was going to overturn everything we thought we knew. He had a million of them. I’ve been in science now long enough to know how the story usually goes — normally the result is wrong or misunderstood and dismissed for good reason within a year or two. You have to really be in the field to follow these things, and he wasn’t. It was kind of shockingly sad to see because he’d impressed me with some of his books in the past.
I picked up his book KICKING SACRED COWS thinking it was going to be smart and interesting, and it was total crap, putting forward a number of flawed and completely discredited ideas. I started to critique the chapter on cosmology, but I realized I’d end up writing a book in order to point out all the problems. Had to just walk away.