Spider Star
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
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Sunday Starlinks
February 12th, 2012
Heavier on the science fiction than the science this week.
Last week I gave Obama some love for promoting science via a White House science fair. This week, I’m disappointed by his cuts to space exploration. Is there a way to cut the space visionary out of Newt Gingrich and graft it onto Obama? What would that look like?
Meanwhile, the NASA breakthrough that could save millions of lives.
The politics of Star Trek. Apparently they’re conservative. Except for the liberal stuff, like internationalism, breaking racial barriers, getting rid of money, etc. You know, I think any decent artwork can be interpreted a number of ways, but there’s also a clear worldview being expressed by the Star Trek franchise. It ain’t generally conservative.
Shifting from Trek to Wars, we’ve got the 3D release of episode one going on, and a whole bunch of articles. A lot of the articles don’t make any sense. For instance, why the prequels are better than the original trilogy. Hard to believe that that writer actually watched the movies I watched, because the prequels suck ass pretty hard, meesa can tell you (as can this article). Here’s another article about Jar Jar Binks that I don’t buy either. That character was about a million times worse than Wesley Crusher. George Lucas had some talent once upon a time, or maybe it was just him being part of a collaborative team that brought out his genius and corrected his weaknesses. I don’t care that much any more. Lucas though is continuing to try to revise history the same way he revises his movies.
The Science Fiction Effect. Basically…cool stuff going on in the world of science gets popularized by science fiction, ergo, science fiction is an important way to disseminate science. Hmmm, sounds like something I might write in a proposal.
I follow cryptozoology at some level. There are definitely previously unknown animals recently discovered, and more to come. I didn’t realize that people had reported seeing Woolly Mammoths in Siberia (with pics!). I’m afraid photographic evidence isn’t enough, however, and while it looked good to me at first glance, I do see the “bear with fish” being plausible as well. Stupid poor photos…
Kevin J. Anderson writing a novel to go with the new Rush album. At first I thought it was a cool idea, but then I worried about the album being much better than the novel, or vice versa, and the stigma of the gimmick marginalizing both. Let’s see how the experiment goes.
William Gibson interviewed by Wired.
Time-lapse video of the VLA in New Mexico. Pretty cool.
Ten Writing “Rules” We Wish Science Fiction Writers Would Break. The issue of women writing hard sf comes up and links to an old post here. I guess the article is just a reminder that there are no true rules to writing. If it works, it works. The rules that exist are guidelines to what usually works, but a clever enough writer can break them. And the women writing hard sf thing…they’re underrepresented, but certainly many can and do.
Another io9.com article. This one on the experts who put the science in science fiction movies. Wish they did it better, or were allowed to do so, being fair. Too many directors prefer something cool and ridiculous to something less cool but realistic, and too many audiences lack a good enough science education to make them pay for it. Happily there are exceptions:
Most scientists are willing to advise not only because it allows them to be gate- keepers of their disciplines, but because they want to be portrayed accurately on-screen. “It’s rare that you have a relatable character,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research associate at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s why James Cameron created Avatar‘s xenobotanist, Grace. “Scientists are usually shown as geeks or losers or evil,” he says. “I wanted to celebrate the mind and the passion of a scientist.”
Expert says intelligent aliens probably wouldn’t visit Earth. Well, that’s like his opinion, man. Seems like I have credentials as good as his and I think they’d come for the humans, but stay for the LOLcats.
Hellboy, the summer camp. Seriously! Got to love it.
And finally, something completely different…Hulk splash!
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I think the question of Star Trek’s conservatism greatly depends on two factors:
1) What we mean when we say “conservative” AND
2) Where in the series we are reading “conservative.”
Is Star Trek conservative by contemporary American standards for conservatism as it is embodied by the GOP (which I don’t see as a conservative institution, but something else entirely)? No. Not by a long shot. Is it conservative by other versions of that term? Sure, to varying degrees. We have to remember that when we say “conservative” we don’t necessarily mean the same thing as when the British say it.
Overall, I wouldn’t call Star Trek, broadly speaking, liberal or conservative in any sense. I would call it progressive, because one need not be a raging liberal to be a progressive, nor a raging conservative in order not to be (well, okay, that second half is wrong). Star Trek swings, as progressives do, between ideologies that are always moving forward, even where they seem to maintain certain spaces as they are. Otherwise, we’d have total disorder. Change is neither conservative, nor liberal, but a combination of the two working in a tenuous balance (again, not the GOP conservative).
I’ll shut up now…
I should note that I didn’t read the post you linked to, because if I had I probably would have just said “this is a pointless discussion to have because it starts with Big Hollywood, a website whose commentators so pathetically misunderstand basic history to the point that they see evil liberals in EVERYTHING they watch.”
After all, how can you take seriously an argument which takes as its basis the following:
–A single episode as a representative of the entire series.
–An accusation that teachers are secret leftist cultists who have taken to manipulating children into believing Nazis were right wing wackos instead of the evil leftists they undoubtedly were (this is laughable in part because most of my students can tell me about as much about WW2 as I can tell them about rap music — that is, the very very basics).
The first is silly for reasons every scientist will understand: if you do not take a representative sample of a population, you cannot make accurate assumptions about the rest. Taking one episode from hundreds (or even just the three seasons worth in the original series) is sort of like asking 100 people at a Tea Party rally what they think of Barack Obama and then applying that to all Americans.
The second because the thing Big Hollywood doesn’t understand is that “fascism” and “socialism” are entirely different things. Socialism tends to be far left, but that greatly depends on whose socialism we’re talking about (we rarely are talking about Hitler’s socialism, but Marxist socialism, which fascism was explicitly set up to rail against in the European fascist quarter — Hitler was hardly a far left ideologue, though he was certainly less right wing than Mussolini overall). Fascism can attach itself to ANY political ideology. Therefore, the fact that socialists have been fascists, as well as right wing conservatives have been fascists, only tells us that ALL political ideologies are susceptible to the whims of power.
Nazism was gloriously complicated, but since right wing people are more often than not against the teaching of other political ideologies as anything other than caricatures, it’s not hard to see why Big Hollywood believes leftist cultists in education are brainwashing kids to believe Hitler was a, well, raging fascist.
This is why reading books published by peer reviewed publishers on these kinds of subjects is so important. If all you view is pop-culture history, then you’re living life through blinders.
But I digress. Stupidity is endless from the quarter of the Internet.
Mammoth footage debunked in comment here by said footage’s real author.
http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2012/02/wooly-mammoth-sighted-in-siberia.html
Joe, thanks! Love it when there is a quick debunking!
Shaun, I agree with you about the shallow and questionable Trek analysis. Unfortunately it sounds like the first in a series!