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
I took the weekend off the big proposal deadline Friday. I’ll do a starlinks post soon, but in the meantime, the video of my recent talk in Gillette, WY, on the science of superheroes is now available. Enjoy! Comments welcome. Share/Bookmark
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>In my opinion, anyway. Here’s the poem, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (and “heard” does rhyme with “Learn’d” better than “listened to”), from Leaves of Grass. WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>A friend sent me a link to an article at Physics Today about The Big Bang Theory. The premise of the article was to ask if the comedy could do more than make people laugh, and to propose it could educate them at the same time. Here is the lead: Could scientists help the cause […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>By monster, I’m talking generally about non-human, non-supernatural creatures that want to kill you and/or eat you, so this excludes vampires, werewolves, Freddy Kruger, and the like. I’m really biased toward giant monsters, or alien creatures from under the water or from outer space, although it’s hard to draw the line on these. By modern, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 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 »>Better than Star Wars? Better than Blade Runner? Better than Back to the Future? Better than Alien? Better than the Matrix? Better than 2001? I don’t think so, even though I enjoyed the movie very much, but the reviewers at IMDB disagree. Top Rated “Sci-Fi” Titles Rank Rating Title Votes 1. 9.0 Inception (2010) 200,923 […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>We’re going to treat astronomers as a subset of physicists here. Sure, some do. A lot don’t. One time I went camping with a group of guys I didn’t know too well. They came from a wide range of backgrounds, and a lot of them were Christians of various fundamentalist stripes. One of these guys […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »>Inspired by this list of the scariest foods (many of which I’ve eaten, including balot and rocky mountain oysters), I was thinking about scary science fiction foods like those live worms that the Klingons eat and decided to try to think of the really distinctive foods and drinks I’ve come across in science fiction. Not […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »>A few days ago I blogged about mainstream stories that I thought could be categorized as light versions of fantasy or science fiction. To qualify, the stories had to fail to reflect reality in some fundamental way without being obviously science fiction or fantasy. When that failure was over-the-top and great liberties are taken with […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>I have mixed feelings about the path Obama has chosen to take with NASA. I hate it when discussions develop along mindless political lines, like how some conservatives say that private industry is always better than the government (it is sometimes but not other times), how some liberals and libertarians think that the government has […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »>Last night I caught the much discussed Discovery Channel episode of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking dealing with aliens. The initial clip on the website is “Fear the Aliens” which is the controversial bit. Hawking, unlike Carl Sagan, apparently thinks that we would have much to fear from technologically advanced aliens and that we […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »>Maybe this is in bad taste. I don’t know. I don’t care too much. There are some weird looking actors out there who have gotten a lot of work over the years. They’re not ugly. They’re “Hollywood Ugly” which means you don’t scream when you see them and there’s something about the way they look […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »>