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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When I was a kid, I collected rocks. One of the rock-related items I bought was a sheet of cardboard labeled Mohs Scale of Hardness. Talc is a one, while diamond is a ten. Tooth enamel is apparently a five. My card didn’t have a diamond on it when I bought it, but an encouraging […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments »>In my second or third year of graduate school, I went through a period of depression of several months after realizing that the Ivory Tower was pretty dirty, even in a field of pure research like astronomy. I was starting to see how politics and power interfered with my ideal of how science, especially a […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »>OK, I’ve already written two posts on this, an initial one with a lot of links and a follow-up after I’d gathered more information for myself. I’ve continued to read some documents, in particular several hundred pages of depositions. Maybe only several hundred…there are thousands there, and depositions are boring mostly. My opinions have evolved […]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>I’ve had some time to read more about what is going on and think I’m getting a clearer picture. Let me restate the basic issue with greater understanding than I did before. Martin Gaskell is an astronomer in my subfield, and a pretty good one, and someone I consider a friend. He’s also pretty religious […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »>I was going to write about something else today, but saw this story about Martin Gaskell, a friend of mine. There’s also a blurb at the Chronicle of Higher Education with a few really interesting comments. Atheist blogger PZ Meyers has a post about the story, most of which I agree with, frankly, but I […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »>I recently posted some thoughts and advice for landing a faculty job. I didn’t mention much about what to do, and not do, on the actual live interview short-listed candidates get. I’ll try to stay general, but my expertise is based on experiences on both sides of the process in the field of astronomy and […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »>Historically women have been less likely to enter the hard sciences than men, and similarly less likely to write hard science fiction. Happily, some do, and do it well, in my opinion. When I talk about hard science fiction, I mean stories in which science is central to the story, doesn’t smell too much like […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments »>Who the crap knows what aliens are going to be like? I don’t, but let me imagine that aliens who have the longevity and technology to learn about us will be rational and not arbitrary in the same ways that we are. Here are things I suspect they won’t understand, and might even believe to […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »>We’re in what I hope is the home stretch of a faculty search for a tenure-track astronomer to join our Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. I probably should have posted something a couple of weeks ago after the first couple stages of the process were complete, or wait until it’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »>I’m giving a university talk today “Science in the Movies.” I decided I wanted to be able to leave the audience with a list of good science-based movies to watch, whether science fiction or not. I not only want the science as good as possible, I want to see a realistic and generally positive portrayal […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »>I got an email from a professor I know. I know a lot of professors, and I won’t say who or where, but this should be more broadly known: This past week I helped grade midterm exams for Calculus I…One of the problems involved an astronaut on the lunar surface throwing a rock vertically into […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>It came up in a post last week (and follow-up comments, thanks James Nicoll!) that E. O. Wilson thinks it would be a bad idea to colonize space, apparently because this is a “ruinously expensive” way to deal with overpopulation. The big space colony days were in the 1970s, after we’d landed men on the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »>