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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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 »>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 »>When I travel and meet a lot of new people, they often ask what I do. When I tell them that I’m an astronomer, and they don’t immediately mumble something about liking astrology or make some other outrageous statement as sometimes happens, they’ll often follow up and ask what, specifically, is my specialty. “Quasars,” I […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 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 »>Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy addresses the question of why are there no green stars. It’s a nice post and brings together astronomy and biology in interesting ways, and reminds me of the posts I did a couple of months ago for a friend who’d just sold a story about life on a world orbiting […]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Earlier this week, award-winning sf writer Nancy Kress (who is attending Launch Pad next week, by the way) wrote a short post about “the point of fiction.” I agree with her that a primary point is indeed “to decide what matters.” Last night, I was starting to reread Robert McKee’s excellent book, Story: Substance, Structure, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »>Here’s the brief article quoting Buzz Aldrin: I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today. All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic…if you […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »>The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going on on-line and will produce the most energetic man-made collisions ever created. There have been concerns that this will produce various doomsday scenarios, but as Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times citing a recent safety report, the particle accelerator isn’t going to create a runaway black […]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>First, I am providing my own personal list in response to yesterday’s American Film Institute list. I’m going to overlook some questionable science in a few movies, and not overweight the science. I am going to leave out fantasy, including superhero movies and Star Wars — mitochlorians or whatever they were called does not make […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »>Okay, I thought this idea was dumb before I read the article. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about extremely hot temperatures, which I didn’t appreciate until I read it. Share/Bookmark
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>In light of the recent posts about the red M stars, as red as they’re perceived to be anyway, I wanted to bring up the issue of the non existence of green stars. A star with the appropriate temperature, not too dissimilar from that of our own Sun, has a spectrum that peaks in the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »>