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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How About Some Hard, Urban Fantasy?
April 7th, 2009
OK, I know that probably sounds obscene, but I’m hard pressed to come up with a name for what I want to talk about. What I’m talking about probably exists, but I’m not familiar enough with fantasy these days to know for sure, so I hope someone can help me out.
Urban fantasy has been popular in recent years, from Buffy to Anita Blake to Kitty and the Midnight Hour. We have vampires and werewolves running around, having problems with their undead boyfriends or demon attacks. You know, the usual.
Now, one of my kicks is getting the science right in science fiction, and finding ways to educate using science fiction, such as with my astronomy-based anthology Diamonds in the Sky. Well, with science fiction, you get the same sort of stories and the same sort of readers quite often. I think it would be refreshing to have some good astronomy in some fantasy books.
See where I’m going with this now?
There are some natural marriages here. A werewolf should know the phases of the moon and how they work like no one else and be able to lecture their astronomy professor on various subtleties. Vampires should know all about sunrise and sunset times, length of twilight, etc., as a function of latitude and time of the year. Most people, and I’m including presumably smart Harvard graduates here (see A Private Universe if you don’t believe me), don’t know how the phases of the moon or the seasons work. I usually have a few Launch Pad attendees confess they didn’t understand them before the workshop.
The graphic novel/movie 28 Days of Night shows vampires exploiting their knowledge of how the days vanish part of the year above the artic circle.
Constellations and other aspects of the sky are probably useful for astrologers, witches, and other magical folks in fantasy, and I would love to see some real astronomy in there, too, and beyond astronomy there must be all sorts of other scientific concepts that would be essential to understand for different types of beings.
So, do these sorts of fantasy stories with serious astronomy and science exist? Anyone have some recommendations? I’d love to be able to ask the National Science Foundation or someone else to fund a fantasy version of Diamonds in the Sky someday. Students turned off by science fiction might perk up a lot if given the opportunity to read a story about vampires and werewolves, even if it teaches them at what time of day to look for a rising half moon, or to understand why twilight doesn’t last as long in the tropics.
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This is the sort of thing that I always wrestle with when I write fantasy (any fantasy I write is pretty much urban fantasy). If something is time sensitive, the first thing that occurs to me is, “Would that be Eastern Standard Time or Greenwich Mean Time?” Because if you’re talking about, say, the end of the world, you’d better get the time zone right. If you’re six hours off the wrong way, you’re screwed.:)
They would have to hire a pretty damn good astrologer to teach that workshop.
[…] Mike Brotherton calls for hard urban fantasy […]
If you’re writing a story on Earth, and your character looks at the sky, given the time and location any astronomer can tell you what they ought to see. Artists get this sort of thing wrong a lot, showing the moon at particular times (e.g. sunrise or sunset) in impossible phases.
I am surprised how often in movies the moon is shown at night but “tilted” with the light shining on it shown as coming somehow from above, ie above the horizon, in which case the sun would still be up, and it wouldn’t be night.
There was a shot in Star Wars with a couple of planets (or a planet and a moon) hanging nearby in space, but each lit from slightly different angles. To all intents and purposes they would be, like the Earth and the Moon, essentially in the same place in relation to the local sun and so lit identically.
Nicholas, you were just noticing the director’s secret Easter Egg, the “Bizarro Moon.” In a tradition handed down through the decades since Alfred Hitchcock, it’s a a way a director can give a producer the finger without being too obvious…
Actually, I just made that all up. People are pretty clueless about the moon. It can appear anywhere in the sky in any phase lit in any manner imaginable and people will buy it, unfortunately.