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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In my post about Ten Things I Hate About Science Fiction I wrote: 4. Inconsistent or illogical time travel. It seems like writers just make up rules for time travel that make no sense a lot more often than other types of stories. I mean, WTF was with that fading photograph in Back to the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »>OK, I’ve given out a list of ten things I hate about science fiction. I love more than I hate, so time to even up the score. I doubt this post will be as popular as that post, however. We love to hate more than we love to love it seems. Anyway, onward: 1. Something […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>There’s a long tradition of writing about utopias, or, conversely, dystopias. Societies in which everything is perfect, or perfectly awful, due to some experiment in how to live, some new technologies, or a new religion or philosophy. The purpose in writing the utopia story is often to describe how the author thinks people could get […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »>It seems that massive Earth-like planets exist in other star systems, rocky bodies with masses several times higher than that of the Earth. Some scientists are trying to understand the geological structure, volcanism, outgassing, and plate tectonics. This is probably more detail than you might need to write a story, but thinking about these details […]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>While there’s an argument to be made that the stupidest, most ridiculous clothes are those worn in real life, usually by clueless celebrities to red carpet events or the masses adopting some current short-lived fad (crocs, I’m taking about you!), it’s clear that we have it dumb in science fiction. I’ve got no problem with […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »>One of the other issues I didn’t mention yesterday that comes up in hard science fiction is figuring out the parameters for artificial gravity. It’s relatively straightforward. Here’s the amazing scene approaching the orbiting space station: It’s possible to calculate the gravity on board the outer ring. Wikipedia provides the necessary information in its article […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>There are a number of issues that continue to keep coming up in hard science fiction, or any science fiction trying to get the facts right. I just helped my collaborator here a few days ago answer a reporter’s questions on one of these (humans expelled into space without space suits). These things should always […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments »>First off, I love science fiction, but when it’s bad, oh boy, there’s little worse. As a writer and scientist, I’m probably more sensitive to some of the bad things than the average person, but there are plenty of things that happen too often that we can probably agree to share for a good two-minute […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 114 Comments »>Sometimes I tell people that I write science fiction for Tor and the Astrophysical Journal. That’s tongue in cheek, mostly, but there is a lot of stuff that scientists work on that is, for want of a better term, “science fiction.” Except that it’s very well-informed with science and worked out in some detail. It’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »>Vylar Kaftan is a talented writer who attended Launch Pad in its first year, 2007. She published a story in the Australian magazine Cosmos, which was in part inspired by the experience. “Pointing at the Moon” is now available for free online. Enjoy! Share/Bookmark
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>OK, maybe, maybe not, but Robert Lemos writing for wired.com, playing up the hyperbole, makes them sound like it with this pronouncement: Rocket Scientists Say We’ll Never Reach the Stars. Which I don’t think anyone quoted in the article ever quite says. Never say never, especially in cases of engineering. It isn’t impossible to reach […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »>I throw a lot of links at the writers attending the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. I usually do it on the fly before a lecture, or embedded within lecture slides. It made sense to pull them out and to put them in one place with a little organization. The idea is that these […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »>