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
“I’m Not Dead Yet!” and “Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts”
July 29th, 2010
I’m not dead yet! It’s just been busy week after busy week. Two weeks ago was Launch Pad. Last week was a Herschel Space Observatory proposal. Then this week it was trying to finish an old project with a visiting collaborator (she leaves tomorrow) — almost done with a draft of the paper but I will need a couple more days. We finished all the technical parts, I think, but were also trying to finish a second paper that she has the lead on, and that will also take a few more days. Then there’s my other visiting collaborator and the project I’m working on with him, which is even bigger…
Oh, I’m on a student’s PhD committee, too, and her defense is tomorrow morning post airport run. More work for her, but no free ride for me…
Some people think professors have summers off. Ha! Not hardly for most of us who take research seriously, and with my job description I have to.
I’m taking a vacation next week before the fall semester starts up, and should be blogging more regularly while doing that (I hope!).
Oh, and to wrap up again with Launch Pad news that’s important to me if no one else, this year’s participants got the instructors Think Geek gift certificates. It was sweet, thoughtful, and touching. No class ever did something like that and I really appreciate it. It’s not needed or expected, which makes it the best kind of gift.
Except…Think Geek has too many cool things!!! I’ve been looking at break time, but it has threatened to delay finish the project. Any suggestions? Otherwise, I suggest you beware geeks bearing gifts! It’ll suck up your time and allow them to sneak up on you and burn you to the ground while you’re distracted by Star Trek lamps, Yoda backpacks, and t-shirts you can play like guitars!
Some Launchpad Inspired Starlinks, or Why No Launch Pad for ME?!
July 26th, 2010
Genevieve Valentine wrote a couple of cool posts for tor.com: four fun things about the universe, and Science! about some other stuff Launch Pad associated. Also see her recent blog entry about how we are all made of stars. That last post sounds like Launch Pad had its desired effect, and I predict Genevieve’s rekindled love affair with astronomy will inspire some great stories and novels in the future.
And how about a Launch Pad workshop for Quantum Physics? In the past I have been contacted about creating Launch Pad workshops in other locations (e.g. London, Pittsburgh), and for other subjects (e.g., neuroscience). I think it would be great to fund a bunch of these somehow, for medicine, law, police, biology, forensics, historical periods, countries, etc. I’ve got the science education angle to promote funding, but some other topics would surely have ways of getting funded, too. Foreign governments interested in bringing in tourism could fund workshops for writers with some guarantee they would write something that would feature that country, for instance.
I’m encouraging this sort of idea very much, because there is really no Launch Pad for ME. Where do I go to have this sort of experience? It’s not just the intensive Intro Class 101 in a week that I miss, tending to have to do my research the old fashioned way with books, but the chance to meet and bond with other talented and interesting writers. I had my version of this at Clarion West 1994 (and can recommend Clarion style workshops as very worthwhile), but I’d love to find a version of Launch Pad for me to teach me what I need to know for the next novel project.
Does anyone know of any Launch Pad type workshops for other subjects? I haven’t noticed any, but there must be things like that out there. I am realizing that there are some great things out there (see some incredible adventures) but they’re not writer specific and look really expensive! Well, they could be tax deductible for a writer I guess, which makes them a little more affordable…I think I might make up a list of these for future fun and research.
I was busy last week from Launch Pad, then busy recovering from Launch Pad, then busy with a telescope proposal (Herschel, if you’re interested, due 5AM yesterday morning, silly Europeans…). So catching again, eternally it seems, with the things I want to get done. I decided this year that blogging was important to me, but not so important it can’t take a back seat when life gets really crazy, and the past ten days have been among the busiest in the last year.
Just before Launch Pad started I found a series of short videos that are priceless, that I can’t believe I never saw before. Maybe they’ll be new to some of you out there, too, and are really prefect for this blog and some of the topics I discuss regularly. So, here are my three favorites:
There are apparently a lot of these, and while I’ve watched a giant pile of Matrix agents worth of them now, I haven’t seen them all. Any other favorites or must-sees?
A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year’s Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the ones I’ve previously posted (and which I feel are still excellent resources).
Here are some of the additional blog posts of my own (many I used with my astronomy class this past spring) that I referred to at the workshop…or should have:
I spent too much time mining youtube this year so far…but I did find some good stuff. Hope I save some people some time by pointing at some good things above.
A pretty gory Mythbuster’s video suggestive of what would happen if you fell into a stellar mass black hole and the tidal forces got you.
Some resources that professional astronomers use, many of which you can use, too!
NASA’s Extragalactic Database (NED) — compilation of information about extragalactic objects, plus some other handy tools and review article library (Level 5).
Launch Pad’s 4th annual workshop has concluded, and it was super again this year. The usual slew of minor problems of one sort or another, and again someone went to the ER (altitude sickness), WIRO had technical problems, etc., so I’m still working on the perfect workshop. The attendees were great, guest Kevin R. Grazier delivered some very interesting talks, and we even had clear skies a few nights.
I worked myself to exhaustion several times, and took a chunk of Sunday to relax. I have a telescope proposal due later this week, so it’s back to the salt mines in the sky tomorrow morning. Should be back to more regular blogging again, too.
I’ll have a couple of Launch Pad posts soon, one with a summary of links around the web (blogs, articles, photos, etc.) and another with a summary of links that should be helpful to attendees post-workshop and other interested parties as well.
And I’m hanging in here…the week is always a lot of fun, but also a bit stressful and tiring. I’ll be making some Launch Pad related posts if time permits, and at least a few summarizing some astronomy resources online here and elsewhere.
Everyone is safely in Laramie and we start another session in the morning. I really like every very much so far, even the people I had already met before, so that’s a good sign.
I believe there will be some attendees blogging, and I’ll see if I can link to them as the week progresses.
I went out with a buddy last night to see Predators, produced by Robert Rodriguez.
If you’re like most people, including me, Predator 2 was ok but not terrific, and the Aliens vs. Predator films weren’t even quite ok (although I kind of like ancient alien pyramids under the ice).
Well, some good news. The new movie is pretty good!
Now, there were a few minor things in the writing and/or editing that I wasn’t wild about, but the dialogue is good, the characters are interested and well played by pretty good to great actors (Adrian Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Lawrence Fishburne, etc.).
I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, but just want to suggest that if you’ve been looking for a science fiction/horror/action movie to see, check this one out.
Oh, and in particular the opening is nicely original even if you’ve seen other elements before.
Shelly Li, a Writer to Watch, and the Issue of Separating Writer from Story
July 9th, 2010
Shelly Li is about the most talented teen I’ve ever known in my life, and I’m proud to call her a friend. She’s 17 and just sold her first novel and has been regularly selling science fiction to high-profile professional markets like the Futures section of Nature.
I want to do two things here with this post. First, I want to plug Shelly and put her on your radar if you’ve never heard of her. She’s going to be around for a long, long time. Discover her now.
Second, I want to discuss writing about controversial topics and how strange and inappropriate it is to confuse the writer and the story they’ve written, and I want to use one of Shelly’s stories as a launch pad.
As a writer, I like to learn new things, try on different perspectives, and explore a variety of issues I find interesting or important. Sometimes in my work there will be a character a lot like me who will be my mouthpiece. Sometimes not. And sometimes the story doesn’t even reflect my worldview at all, but I want to just look at things differently for a while. It makes sense not to read too much into a story about the author, because you just don’t know. Some people think they can read a story and tell if someone is racist or sexist, for instance, and while the story probably provides clues, they might be totally wrong in the cases of very skilled writers doing a subtle point of view trick, or bad writers using biased research materials. A friend read one of my stories once and told me I had to be in love, but I was in between girlfriends and was not. I know a popular writer who got turned down from Clarion West because his horror story was so horrible he had to be kept away from other students (and I just thought writing a horrifying horror story meant you were a good writer!). I’ve seen enough people get it so wrong that I rant about it from time to time, and have little patience with folks who claim magic powers to know what someone is like from their writing, or in fact their art in general. Some artists who create scary stuff are nice, polite, and friendly. Some scary looking people create the sweetest things.
Now, back to Shelly. I’m not going to assume anything about her religious beliefs — I don’t know them and we haven’t discussed them. All I know is that it’s something she thinks about and discusses sometimes.
Shelly wrote an interesting short short story for Nature called “The End of God.” First of all, Nature only buys very short stories, so they are not usually excessively deep explorations of a topic. I almost think of short short stories as jokes. They have a set-up and a punch line. They need not be funny, but they’re so short that they have to have a quickly grasped point and an impact to take away. Shelly’s has that and it works, I think. Appreciate that they’re really hard to do well and if they make you feel anything, think a bit, and stick with you any length of time, they’ve succeeded at some level.
Shelly’s story makes out atheists to be well-meaning but oppressive bad guys, at least from the perspective of the male protagonist. I point this out because in comments at the site and at PZ Myer’s atheist-oriented blog, the main character is made out to be a “she” — already people confuse the writer and the story. Especially with first person perspective, readers identify the author as the main character. It’s a short story, the “sir” in the first line of dialogue makes it clear…but I digress.
What amazes and disappoints me are how many comments amount to personal attacks on Shelly, or assumptions about her own religious belief. Some are amazingly condescending, suggesting that when she gets older she’ll gain deeper wisdom about religious issues.
You can’t read one short story by an author and know for sure anything that they believe about the world!
I myself have a story about faith I’ve wanted to write for years, but the project requires a lot of research and I haven’t gotten around to it. I suspect that readers of that story would be surprised to discover that I was an atheist. Faith is antithetical to reason, but it provides strength to people and I want to explore that in this story. We’ll see if I get around to it. I also want to write a novel called GUNWORLD, and I’m not a big gun guy, but I digress again…
Most of the time, especially when you read a body of an author’s work, you figure out their worldview and what they think about things. I think we have a pretty good idea about what Hemingway admired and what he feared. Tarantino is obviously a foot fetishist. I think it’s clear that Stephen King is clearly a murdering maniac…wait, this doesn’t work all the time!
Anyway, it’s hard enough for a new writer to take criticism of their work. It’s crazy hard to take criticism of themselves, and it’s unfair to offer it.
I’ve heard stories from editors about a writer who finds fat women attractive and apparently puts plus-sized gals into his books. An appropriate comment from an editor might be to advise him to slim the women down, at least some of the time, if he wants to find a more receptive audience (although a niche audience can be powerfully good, too, if large enough and faithful enough). It would be horrible to tease him for his preferences or to tell them that he’s a weird pervert. Or consider the case of a writer wanting to explore the mind of a chubby chaser and this was a one off thing and being accused of a sexual preference he doesn’t have. Straight writers do write about gay characters, and vice versa, and it’s ok. We follow our muses.
I remember having a talk at a convention with Tom Godwin’s daughter. Godwin wrote “The Cold Equations,” a classic of hard science fiction. In the story, a young innocent girl bravely commits suicide to save the lives of other people. Apparently Godwin, whose early drafts of the story did not have the girl die, got a lot of flak and was accused of hating women on the basis of this story, and it pained him very much according to his daughter.
So next time you’re going to rip on an author for views or attitudes you think they have, think twice. By all means rip on a story if you think it deserves some harsh criticism, but don’t be so sure you know what the author thinks. Sometimes we mean just what we say, and sometimes we’re turning things around to get a new perspective.
The Problems Writers Face Creating Villains and Some Solutions
July 8th, 2010
I saw a review of The Last Airbender on TV the other day. The reviewers didn’t like the movie, and I decided not to see it. They also pointed out that the heroes all had lighter shades of skin than the villains (and the director, for that matter). The reviewers were white males, but we’re all getting sensitized to this issue of meta level choices regarding stories. We’re not a culture free from prejudice, so I guess I can’t yet get too upset that people aren’t color blind. We’re not living in the Star Trek future or even the world of South Park where the boys just see a bunch of guys lynching another guy without noticing the colors of the people.
The choice of villain is one of the easiest points of criticism. No one wants to see their particular group associated with villainous qualities. I remember hearing about Latinos upset with Crocodile Dundee for fighting Colombian drug lords in his second movie (seriously). Iran was upset that their ancestors invaded Greece a few thousand years ago and someone made a movie making them look bad doing it. There were conservatives upset with James Cameron’s Avatar which had big business and the military cast as the bad guys (even choosing white males doesn’t keep a writer safe). Hell, people complained about Jaws and how it unfairly portrayed sharks!
There’s a hypocrisy here at work among the forces of political correctness who fight against stereotyping. They want everyone to be taken as individuals, on their own merits, rather than qualities assigned to an entire class (many of which are likely to be erroneous in the case of the individual). On the other hand, our poor villain in an individual story is taken as a representative for the entire class/race/gender and the writer castigated for the choice.
After a while, as a writer, you do start worrying about your choices. The forces of political correctness likely will take this as victory — the writers are conforming to our political positions! Hooray!
There have been a few safe choices. During the cold war communists were good villains. Nazis are still ok under all circumstances — Germans shun that part of their history and neo-Nazis don’t seem to object (in fact the opposite sometimes). White males won’t say boo about the white male serial killer — they mostly are white males (although professional clowns will get upset with Gacy being thrown out there too often, I’ve seen). We don’t really have the communists around as an easy option these days (I heard the remake of Red Dawn in the works will have Chinese invaders), and it’s hard to reinvent Nazis and serial killers, although Tarantino and the writers of Criminal Minds seem to be doing an entertaining job. Oh, child molesters are free game; always feel free to make your villain a child molester.
But to tell the truth, art is personal. It shouldn’t be political. It shouldn’t be controlled by fear of what others think.
We’ll have bland, uninspired, homogeneous crap in the end if that’s the case.
Everyone, everything, should be fair game for art, in my opinion.
But my artistic ideal isn’t a solution. People will still sometimes get upset with artists following their visions no matter what, and writers will feel the pressure.
Here’s one solution, and it’s the same one that was used in politically repressive countries like the Soviet Union. Write science fiction or fantasy!
If your evil overlord is an ugly alien creature from Alpha Centauri, who’s going to get upset? If it’s goblins torturing your heroes, there isn’t a goblin lobby that’s going to start a boycott. J. K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort is part snake or something and inhuman on screen. (Just don’t make the mistake that George Lucas made for The Phantom Menace of having aliens as too obvious stand-ins for human stereotypes).
Machines as in The Terminator or the underrated horror movie Hardware are another good choice.
If that’s too trite for you, well, I have another solution, too. Don’t have a bad guy in your story. Just have real, three-dimensional characters with their own goals and desires. Few people are outright monsters, and I’m sure that the CEO of BP, Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden, and other vilified folks, all see themselves as heroes and have people around them who love them. This more complex story can be harder to write, but more satisfying in the end.
Another type of story I like is where the environment is the antagonist. The moon is a harsh mistress, as they say, and just surviving and succeeding in nature can be a monumental challenge.
You can also make your hero and your villain have the same general characteristics, especially if you want to make them seem evenly matched, flip sides of the same coin. It’s no guarantee that you won’t be criticized but at least you have a defense.
But if the vision you had of your story requires a secret sect of tattooed Indian lesbian Catholic priestesses on a jihad to make the world safe for Nazis peddling drugs to Republican congressmen and their Rottweilers, I say go for it. Just make it so good no one can put it down and be ready to handle a little criticism.
This is a true story. It’s kind of funny, kind of stupid, but it’s true and that’s the important thing.
I was a smart kid growing up, usually at the top of my class, always fiddling with one project or another. I was into the stars, dinosaurs, chemistry, science fiction, making movies, writing stories, chess, D&D. You know, the fun nerd stuff. Most of what I was about usually came back around to science in one form or another.
There were some feelings of insecurity, however, and ignorance about some fundamental things concerning a career in science. Not that I would have admitted it then. Probably not, anyway. I knew to be a scientist you had to go to grad school and get a PhD. I thought grad school was like law school or medical school and would require big student loans, but I also knew that science didn’t pay as well as law or medicine, so I didn’t really understand why people would put themselves through that. I figured there was something special about them, that they were beyond me, more dedicated or more talented somehow.
I went to Rice University and majored in electrical engineering. Engineering made sense. Four years of tuition, high-paying good job on the other end, and engineers worked with scientists on big projects like spacecraft that would scratch my science itch. Still, I liked astronomy so much that I kept taking courses in the field and wound up with a double major, adding space physics (the closest Rice had to an astronomy major).
My sophomore year I took the introductory astronomy courses, a two-class sequence, for major students. I got the highest score on the first exam, 100%, and the professor scribbled “Come see me sometime” on the exam. I felt sort of inadequate, not even being a major just yet. That would change soon, and I owed it to my professor. All the grad students in the department called him “Reggie” but even years from now he is imprinted on me as “Dr. Dufour.” He was a good professor and a good scientist. He was also a short guy, a bit overweight, with a hearing aid and a touch of a cajun accent. I thought of him as our own regional version of Jack Horkheimer, whose PBS segments about astronomy always ended with “keep looking up.”
Later that year my partner and I were trying to get some data for an astronomy lab. We wanted to use a bigger telescope (16 inch diameter) outside of town that we had access to, as the 6 inch celestrons from downtown Houston weren’t the best choice. We went out one weekend, an hour and a half drive to Huntsville, TX, and had all sorts of problems. The telescope was not used often and was cranky, and just didn’t work well. We couldn’t get any data for our project. Dr. Dufour promised to go out with us the following weekend and guaranteed data for us. We lit up like minature supernovas at that!
We all went out and Dr. Dufour struggled with the telescope as much as we had. And then some. We were students, too afraid to push things too hard. Not so for a professor to help his dedicated students…but his best efforts wound up with a frozen scope stuck in an odd position and his screwdriver sliding to the bottom of a deep shaft.
He cussed up the biggest storm of foul words that I’d ever heard a professional utter in my whole life.
My partner and I were a little shocked.
We never did get the scope working for us, and settled for the smaller telescopes and skies of Houston to finish the project, but that night made a big impact on me.
My professor, who I looked up to so much, was human like me. I could be a scientist, too, and perhaps someday a professor as well. It was a really important insight for me to have at that stage, and I will always be grateful for his effort, enthusiasm, and honesty. That night, and several more incidents during my time in college made me realize that Dr. Dufour was also a great person and caring professor that I was lucky to have. He is still an inspiration to me working with my students and thinking back reminds me of the responsibility I have as I exert influences on others today that may be deeper than I recognize.
