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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My Perfect Science Fiction Novel
May 21st, 2012
My perfect SF novel, the kind I love to read, and that I’ll probably always be struggling to write, contains:
-One or more heroes who use, primarily, their intelligence to reach toward their goals.
-Spaceships in space.
-Aliens, usually to serve as a mirror for ourselves.
-Big stakes, at least life and death, and some action so it isn’t simply cerebral.
-Something original I haven’t seen before.
-Engaging writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself in service of a fast-moving plot.
-Few or minimal mistakes. I primarily see science mistakes, but obvious errors of fact destroy my suspension of disbelief.
I blame at least some of this on growing up with Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and the like. I have a need for the new and the alien, and the phrase “space, the final frontier” is embedded deep in my hindbrain. Computers and robots, steampunk and alternative histories, apocalypses, time travel…they’re just okay. Nothing wrong with them, but for a novel to be perfect for me, everything’s better with a spaceship.
How about you?
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Good list! For the perfect novel, at some point it turns out that the life-and-death stakes you thought were going on is actually a detail, and really there’s some Much Bigger Deal happening (preferably with at least galactic scale implications…) That feeling of the reveal, that ‘oh, f**k I didn’t see that coming’ is what makes it for me.
Agreed, everything’s better with a spaceship.
Oh, and actually resolve the story threads before book seven in the series, please. It’s great to close one and open the seeds of the sequel, but I can’t stand it when nothing gets resolved…. although for me, nothing beats the chills I still get from the last line of Rama.
Mike, you forgot the robots. You gotta have robots!
Graham, my last novel was full of robots…the current work in progress, not so much.
Jonathan, I loved the last line of Rama, too! I do like a story that’s big enough to keep you thinking about the repercussions after it’s over. Tie things up into a package, but not too neatly, or it feels contrived to me (and of course I know every novel is contrived, but I don’t want to feel that).
I also like that kind of space SF story (and have fond memories of reading tons of Larry Niven books, for instance, and James Blish’s Cities in Flight), but I also greatly enjoy time travel and alternate history stories, especially when they mix fiction and history in an interesting kind of way, and far future stuff that blurs the boundary of SF and fantasy like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I’m not sure I have a single necessary subject for my perfect novel.
Can’t disagree with that list.
Also for me the best sf novels deal with contemporary issues, albeit transposing them into a future context, but with something we can identify that’s not too obviously confined to our time, such as political allegory (although a certain I.M Banks can just about get away with that). After all, people will be fundamentally the same (unless they go for cyborg fusion option – and if they do we have to examine what humanity remains). And when there are aliens they can be quite human-like, especially if they have observed our culture and learned to communicate on our level. Or others so alien that we never really can explain their motives much less reason with them, but they challenge our long held assumptions about reality, or exploit them. Perhaps those are the aliens we won’t see until it’s too late.
I like stories that explore time on evolutionary and geological time scales, but without the use of time travel. Examples: The ending of the Planet of the Apes, or almost any Stephen Baxter novel. The spine tingling vastness and irreversibility of time that Baxter’s stories are imbued with more than make up for his astonishing lack of understanding of how real people work.
timebinder, you might like Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge.
Thanks, Mike! I came across that book online a long time ago but forgot the name and author. I just placed a hold on it at the library and am picking it up tomorrow.
Spaceships are nice but not necessary in my idea of the perfect novel. You can still get a sense of awe without them. I think spending a lifetime working in astronomy and not being able to get to those awesome things and mysteries could colour one enough to say, “space travel – at almost any cost”. But with no space travel there must be some other sf device to entertain me sufficiently.
Marooned in Realtime is technically a sequel to The Peace War. Both are good, and I believe that the second can be read without the first. The second is the kind of thing you like and has a different feel from the first.
Yes, absolutely. Put me down for that. Probably a reflection of the era we grew up in. BTW really appreciate the work you have done with your novels and launchpad.
Thanks, Brad.