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
What is it with women and the sciences? Some experiments suggest it isn’t stereotype threat. Wondering about it myself right now since our fraction of female grad student applications in astronomy seems a little low, although a couple of women are among the strongest, too.
Five things to know before dating a scientist. A bit too much generalizing for my taste. It may be that scientists generally abide by some stereotypes, but some are extremely clueless and some are extremely cool.
And Missouri going after evolution education. Idiots. This guy, too, who denies it. Teaching the controversy is not what educators should do. There is NO CONTROVERSY among educated people on this topic. Only those with religious bias resist.
Final Ebook Covers for Star Dragon and Spider Star
January 24th, 2012
Thanks to my friend Jessica Goldman for font help, as folks correctly pointed out my inexperience with handling fonts and made some good suggestions a few weeks ago when I posted my original cover concepts. These new covers have text and art that are much more integrated and are still clear to read. I’m getting more help from Guido Henkel. When the ebooks are ready I’ll send copies to some of those who provided helpful advice.
I still do have the chance to make some small fixes if anyone sees a glaring error or problem. I could be overlooking something…professors have the “absent-minded” stereotype for a reason! I’m just now seeing that the covers have different relative dimensions, and I’m not sure why…hmmm. It’s probably ok?
Well, I have a million other things to do. Thanks again for the input!
Some starlinks for this week. I have a load more on another machine, mostly science/politics/education, and may post those later this week. In the meantime, lots of interesting things:
Scientist pickup lines, backed by Howard Wollowitz. I don’t suggest anyone actually use any of these, but thinking of them as bad science jokes, they’re worth a few moments diversion. A couple may be LOL worthy.
A scientific literacy quiz. Kind of dumb from question one, which doesn’t specify a percentage by mass or particle density or an altitude. Sort of the science factoid version of scientific literacy, which I think is insufficient as literacy about the scientific process is equally valuable. OK, I just did the first 12 of 50, getting them all correct, and have to say it’s slow and too many questions are really science trivia for my taste.
Fringe renewal sounds iffy again. I like the show and wish it continues, but mostly I’d be happy with an ending at this stage when it does go. I’m still haunted by Twin Peaks.
The rise of, and limitations of, groupthink. This is one reason I stopped playing RPGs in favor of writing.
Digital textbooks. As a college professor, I have been giving thought to the future of (higher) education. Some opportunities to do some things better and cheaper, but also some potential pitfalls.
What if humans were twice as intelligent? Republicans wouldn’t exist? Ha ha! Ok, that’s a biased, partisan joke that not everyone would find funny. I do wonder about the changes if the intelligence distribution were changed in various ways, as well as the distribution of personal work ethic, creativity, physical appearance, gender, etc. Mess with any of them and you’ve got an interesting science fiction story. Yeah, many of them have been done, but an infinity remain.
I thought to myself, maybe that’s true. For the last 30+ years comics having been getting more adult. This reflects some symbiotic relationship involving the suppliers offering more complex material and older/more sophisticated readers. The 1980s saw Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Claremont, and others pushing the envelope both in specialty titles and in mainstream books involving Batman and the X-Men.
This is fucking old news.
Let me explain how old. The article goes into Starfire being transformed from a kid’s character (presumably on the anime version of Teen Titans) into a bikini-clad bombshell with a lot of sexuality. Know how she looked when she was first introduced 30 years ago in DC comics?
Complain if you want that she was the stereotypical sexy big-breasted superheroine, much too common. Don’t be an ignoramus complaining that DC recently made her into this as an intentional move to alter a version of a character from a children’s show when this was how she always was in the comics.
I hate the ignorant pontificating, especially when they rarely seem to follow up with an apology for being idiots.
A friend of mine (the awesome Andy Duncan if you know him) got a letter published in People magazine after the first X-Men movie came out. They’d run a review about that movie that complained that this was a movie based on a comic book, and since when did a kid’s medium have stories about discrimination? Well, for DECADES! And I recall a Time magazine review of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, complaining that it was a thinly veiled AIDS allegory, demonstrating a reviewer totally ignorant of the fact that the book came out years before the AIDS crisis hit. Reporters and reviewers out of their element is nothing new, unfortunately.
But this is only a minor aspect of my annoyance. I’m already too used to folks who know nothing about comics complaining about them for stupid reasons. Let me expand my ire to the “protect the children” crap that this article endorses with the extreme quoting from a child psychologist:
It’s sort of like a fictionalized Playboy for kids at its worst,” said Neil Bernstein, Ph.D., a child psychologist and author of “How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble.”
“I think too many kids would be put in harm’s way or at risk,” Bernstein said.
The female characters are more sexualized. One of the most noticeable transformations is Starfire. The character goes from a kids Cartoon Network superhero in a full-length jumpsuit to a scantily clad, voluptuous version in the comic Red Hood and the Outlaws. This Starfire is shown in a barely there bikini or the equivalent of pasties over her breasts and a thong.
“Do you want to have sex?” she says propositioning her boyfriend’s pal, and later says, “Love has nothing to do with it.”
It is these kind of images and suggestive language that concern Bernstein.
“It’s a misrepresentation of reality. It sends the wrong message,” he said.
“We want our kids to think sex is an act between two consenting mature individuals who care deeply for one another. That doesn’t really come across and it’s too easily to misconstrue things particularly for a kid,” Bernstein said.
Ugh. Where to start?
“Misrepresentation of reality?” Well, crap, let’s get rid of all science fiction and fantasy! Protect the kids!
>More importantly, these comics are labeled with intended audiences by age ranges. The things he is complaining about are for older teens and adults (appropriately rated T and T+). One the one hand, people scream for ratings to protect the children. When they’re there, they ignore them and complain about what the children are being exposed to. Hypocrites. Once upon a time I had girlfriend who thought cartoons — in any form — were intrinsically for kids, and we had a big argument about it. I’m still mad about that. She was just wrong. Comics/cartoons are an artistic medium that can and is chosen to tell different kinds of stories.
Additionally, and I see women’s studies professors if not a child psychologist acknowledging this even if they’re not always universally consistent: sex and love need not go together. If they do, fine, that can be good and healthy. If they don’t, well, that can be good and healthy, too. I’m not a fan of people, psychologists or not, pushing their morality. I actually think it’s healthier to tell people that not everyone believes they have to go together, as a lot of people of both sexes get hurt when their sexual relationship turns out not to be a love connection.
And the violence? When were comic book superheroes NOT about violence? Punching, kicking, power blasts, disintegrations, radiation poisoning, gunshots, oozing bloody wounds, broken ribs, swords through the body, murdered innocents…this was all COMMON back in the 1970s and 1980s. I’d need some convincing that it suddenly exploded in 2011 or 2012.
I think this article is crap. Scare mongering and cheap “protect the children” crap.
You want to protect the children? Don’t go after comics, where a small subset of kids are extending their reading skills and learning to appreciate art. Go after cheap B-movies found on cable and the internet that are exploitative of sex and violence and very accessible to kids (even though we have v-chips in our tvs that I never heard of anyone using). Go after the big dog of Hollywood…and see what influence real money buys. And I guess “moral” senators have over the years, with some of the same problems of ignoring the existence of ratings and blaming the wrong people.
Personally I think most kids can take more adult stuff than most adults give them credit for. The sex, to me, is less damaging than the violence, although I’m not convinced fictional violence makes for violent people. Most seem able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, the way adults do.
Don’t like it? Don’t read it or watch it. And don’t go telling everyone else they can’t have it either, especially when you lie about trying to protect the children. Let their parents do that if they’re inclined.
So, it’s high time someone made a sequel to it, and now someone is! In partnership with Sagan’s colleagues Ann Druyan (who is also his widow) and Steven Soter, Seth MacFarlane — yes, that Seth MacFarlane — is going to produce a new 13-part series to serve as a sequel and modern update to Sagan’s masterpiece.
Taking over the hosting duties will be none other than well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has served as host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS for the past five years, so he has plenty of experience making science accessible to the general public. It would be difficult to think of anyone who would be better able to succeed the late, great Carl Sagan.
The folks working on it will take their time and do it right — it’s not scheduled to air until sometime in 2013.
This is very cool. And it is thanks in part to “The Family Guy” Seth MacFarlane being a science fan. It’ll probably look something like this:
OK, probably not, but that there’s funny. And Foxworthy. Heh.
As an astronomer who studies black holes, teaches cosmology, and is generally well informed about science fictional news, I was surprised. I continued to be surprised as I read the article. I followed their link back to the information they based their story upon: Mini-Black Holes that look like Atoms Could Pass through Earth Daily at physorg.com.
The article is about some theoretical physicists who decided to ignore the untested idea of Hawking radiation and the consequence that tiny black holes evaporate. It’s Hawking, and the ideas seem good, but we don’t have a solid theory of quantum gravity and have not ever detected the effect, so, ok. They then assume that the dark matter out there, an idea that has passed some observational tests even though we don’t know what it is composed of, is made of these tiny black holes. There are some untested ideas that such things could have been created during the big bang. The theorists go on to determine some properties these things might have in the absence of Hawking radiation and relatively rapid evaporation, and how it might be possible to detect them if they exist.
I can get behind this without believing it. This is what scientists do. Test our ideas. Challenge the status quo. Develop falsifiable hypothesis.
No physicists or anyone else made a claim that black holes are passing through the Earth daily or on any time scale. There was a proposal and some tests proposed. The idea is brand new and contrary to some ideas that have been popular the last few decades about the nature of black holes, so it’s very speculative.
Now, someone is reading this over their morning coffee and not saying “WTF?” but “Interesting, I didn’t know that.” And then they’re going to tell their friends and it may become one of those well known “facts” that is not true, like:
Humans only use 10% of their brains. Not true. At one stage it was unknown what 90% of the human brain did.
…or…
There are a million of these. Many are based on scientific ideas or studies, but the findings have been repeated without key qualifiers or misunderstood completely. I’ve believed many of these over the years, and probably believe several right now that I don’t know are myths. It kind of sucks. Bad science reporting is partially to blame, and I do take it personally. I want to work with the best information possible and not mislead people myself. Interesting little facts creep into my novels…I just hope I’m not perpetuating myths when I do it.
There can be good science journalism. There are a few good examples. Science reporters, be like the good ones and be responsible and get it right!
I had a busy couple of days, and tonight I’m observing at the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO). I’m not sure I’ve blogged about observing before. I know haven’t recently. I thought I’d share a little bit of what it’s like, at least until we get closer to astronomical twilight here on Jelm Mountain.
WIRO has a 2.3 meter telescope, which was a big deal when it was built in the late 1970s. Today in 2012 it has slipped from being tenth or eleventh largest in the world to something like 50th. It’s still a big deal for us locally, because we have a lot of access and student’s can easily get data. For universities without this sort of facility, there’s a process to apply to one of the national observatories, compete against dozens of other projects, and get assigned time some months later. Then airplane tickets to fly out, a big trip, and a big roll of the dice for good weather.
We’re more flexible and can watch the weather. In the winter we watch closely. The weather is pretty warm today, although windy. We took our Polaris ATV up the mountain. My grad student Rana is currently starting up the equipment and teaching my undergrad Sam how to do it. There are literally dozens of computers, circuit breakers, cables, switches, etc., to activate and set up. One of our grad students has a nice webpage with some technical details.
Usually something doesn’t go right, and we have to do things several times and troubleshoot any problems to get everything up and running. Had to restart the computers twice already. Second time everything was fine.
We’re going to do spectroscopy tonight. That’s obtaining spectra, the rainbow of light you can see reflecting off the surface of a DVD. Our targets are quasars and other less luminous active galaxies. We want to get data for Sam to work on this semester as first priority. We also want to contribute some data to our collaborators working in Arizona who are using a technique called reverberation mapping to measure the black hole masses in these active galaxies. It reqiures many spectra taken over many weeks or months, and last I checked their weather forecast wasn’t so good for tonight.
In the winter, the nigths are long. We hope to observe all night and collect all the data we need. Our detector in our spectrograph is cooled with liquid nitrogen, but it won’t last all night, but will boil off about halfway through, and we’ll have to refill it.
We’ll sleep in the bedrooms up here when we’re done, and drive down the mountain in the afternoon. It’s safer that way. We’ll be rested, and if we have a problem we’re not stranded in the middle of the night in the remote mountains.
We have a target list and have to get it typed into a file on one of the computers so we can use the coordinates to point the telescope at our galaxies.
We’ll take our data down with us and “reduce” it in town this week. We’ll just have dozens of digital images, in black and white, of those rainbows from quasars and some calibration starts. Also from some arc lapms (e.g. neon lights) and some bright white lights. There are about ten stages to use these images to create a final spectrum, that is a measure of the radiative flux (energy per second per square centimeter per Angstrom) as a function of wavelength (in Angstroms).
When we have those, we make measurements, do some analysis, and start to “do science.” (Stand back!)
The specific science we’re doing, without getting to specific, is to find sources of scatter in the black hole mass measurements, find properties that correlate with the scatter, and use them to eliminate or minimize it, resulting in better masses. Sometimes science is figuring out what an object is (e.g. a quasar is the light shining from hot gas as it spirals into a supermassive black hole), sometimes it is measuring those properties and seeing how they relate to each other to provide better understanding (e.g., what’s the mass of the black hole) and sometimes it is perfecting those techniques (e.g., measuring the masses better). When the measurements get better, sometimes you can make new discoveries. The discovery of dark energy relied upon refining techniques of measuring distances to supernovas.
Currently black hole masses are uncertain to factors of 2-3. That’s a pretty large uncertainty. I think we can do better.
So, we’re sitting up all night on a cold Wyoming mountaintop, hoping the clouds will stay away and the wind won’t get so strong we’ll have to close down.
Working from the feedback and mock-ups from a couple of weeks ago…I’ve got one cover I’m mostly happy with:
Thanks for the helpful feedback, especially about the fonts. I tried to make the letters here a little nebulous and fit in with the background more explicitly. I could perhaps do better yet, but it’s in the right direct and I don’t have forever. And the Science Fiction Book Club is not the most quotable source for a blurb, but I thought the quote hit my target audience well.
There’s a fun, literary homework problem in the textbook I’m using this semester (Foundations of Astrophysics by Ryden and Peterson). It’s a pretty good textbook overall, although it’s a bit calculus heavy for when some of our students take my course and it’s short on example problems. One thing I do like is that the authors are well educated outside of science, and have some culturally interesting asides and work in literary references into the text and homework. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a favorite of mine, but I don’t recalling catching this howler when I read it, and I should have:
“It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the Sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends.”
One way of checking the accuracy of this passage is to look up the coordinates of Rigel and go use a planetarium program and set it for Cuba, 6pm, September 15th. A bit easier to get the same answer is to determine the local sidereal time at that time and time of the year and comparing the coordinates of Rigel (local sidereal time or LST is basically the same as the right ascension coordinate of stars passing directly overhead).
The easiest way for myself, and I imagine most people reading here, is to realize that Rigel is a very bright star and part of the best recognized constellation: Orion. Rigel is the knee opposite the bright red shoulder of Betelguese.
Now, knowing which star is Rigel, Betelguese, Sirius, Deneb, Vega, or whatever, is not something the average person knows. I do think the average person, even those living in larger cities, knows Orion. They also might be able to recall that it’s a constellation easily seen in the early evening in…the winter. Like now. In September, at sunset, it is not in the sky. It hasn’t yet risen, and won’t be up until very late in the night.
Don’t let Hemingway’s poor astronomy knowledge stop you from reading The Old Man in the Sea. It’s a really good read otherwise, and one of the inspirations for my novel Star Dragon.
(T.S. Eliot has an even worse howler that I’ll dig up and discuss at a later date.)
Well, it was my first class of the spring semester this morning. It’s a relatively big class for intro astronomy for majors: 22 students. But that’s not a problem since they seem enthusiastic, motivated, and totally awesome.
I had a few standouts last time I taught this class, but I think there’s going to be a critical mass of really great people who are going to make a go of astronomy as a career, and they will feed off each other, and bring everyone along, whether they’re career-minded or not.
It’s very early to conclude this, but I’ll be optimistic. No reason not to be.
This is what professors love about teaching the subject they’re passionate about: kindling that some fire in others who are where we were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. It’s a special feeling hard to describe, but if you’ve felt it, you understand.
In any event, I think it’s going to be a great semester. It’s a great thing to have a job where you get to spend your days thinking and talking about something you love.
I’ve let these pile up too high, given the holidays, and some personal issues that have taken a lot of time and induced too much stress (I love my wife, but I don’t love the immigration process!).
Hawking says women are greatest mystery. This is both profound and stupid, unfortunately, from different perspectives. This is potentially very sad if the accusations that he was abused by his wife are true. Hawking got a response, which is unfortunately sort of offensive if taken as a personal reply to Hawking whose experience in life is unique. Cheap bitching at his expense, with a mix of insight and useless generalizations about how he shouldn’t generalize.
Obama says he is not “Spock-Like.” Duh. Tuvok! Actually I see the last three democratic presidents as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The Republicans all look like Ferengi to me.
And then bullshit article number one: Scientists say Shroud of Turin Supernatural. What crap “research” is this? The article does not read like science at all to me. Religious people who look to science for support of the supernatural are fools, and “scientists” who claim supernatural explanations are not scientists. Scientists look for natural explanations, and when they don’t find them, they leave it as “yet to be explained” rather than saying “God did it.” Science has a great track record explaining things previously attributed to gods, and the medieval Turin hoax is not going to overturn that.
Thinking about book covers recently, and here’s a list (with images) of 36 retro science fiction book covers. I love some of these. Some are…odd. And speaking of odd…
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list of Eight Free Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read. I’m not sure I agree. I think we’d be better off in a few cases if NO ONE read some of those books. Also, most of them are old and outdated in some important ways and would need some guidelines to read. Similarly, some are simply ugly slogs given that the writers are not brilliant at writing the way they are at thinking about their topics. I guess some modern takes (e.g. Dawkins on Evolution) aren’t free, so you mostly get old things out of copyright.
And speaking of free educational materials, MIT will have free online courses. Sometimes I feel like I have the ultimate job security, and sometimes I feel like the concept of job security is obsolete. The future will be interesting.
Something we will have in the future that is realistic…a science fiction themed brothel in Nevada. The Area 51 Cathouse. I kid you not. Reminded me of that scene from Sixteen Candles. You know the one.
Velociraptors inspiring robots. I actually had a story idea about this some 15 years ago, which would be “The Last Dinosaur,” a solar-powered rover based on a velociraptor still operating on Mars a century from now.
Let’s end with three interesting videos covering science, science fiction, and superheroes:
We, the astronomers who use the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO), had our winter training today. Let me provide a few shots showing what that entails:
These are two new winter vehicles I had not driven before, but needed to learn how to drive. I’ve driven snowcats in the past, but this one is new an improved with some different procedures. You haven’t lived, or crapped your pants, the way we do riding on an ATV or snowcat on a mountain road with snow drifts and a thousand foot drop off to the side. With gusting wind and blowing snow.
It is dangerous, so we train for it. We also train to deal with injuries, contact help, meet the helicopter in the event of an emergency evacuation, use different types of fire extinguishers, and dress to hike five miles down the mountain in a blizzard. On that last one…you’re usually better off staying at the observatory unless it’s a serious emergency or other problem. One of my good reminders: I’ve never been too warm on Jelm mountain in the winter.
This is all on top of running the observatory/telescope and collecting data to do our science.
It isn’t an easy calling, but it can be fun and very satisfying when it works out. I’m hoping the ATV will be appealing to would-be graduate students for our department. About the only place more challenging to observe is Antarctica, which one of my buddies has done, and he can keep it. Astronomy in Wyoming is challenging enough for me!
