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
Manipulating science reporting is not cool. Apparently the study of genetically modified food giving rats tumors is fatally flawed and biased. This kind of underhanded thing can work, but it can also backfire. Now I’ll be suspicious of studies reaching conclusions about the health risks of GMOs. Here’s another article about the bad science being [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Busy, stressful week. Going to kick it Klingon Style this weekend though: Share/Bookmark
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Too many people float through life without taking control of their own path. It’s hard to take control, but it’s possible. If you can figure out what you want, you can empower yourself to make it happen. Some things are out of reach for most of us. I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »>I get email from cranks several times a year, with bold subject lines like “SCIENCE TOPPLED!” That one from this week comes from one Ramesh Varma and you can see the claim if you follow the link. Basically he’s claiming that a planet’s atmospheric pressure depends on its density (as well as its distance from [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »>With the starship conference going on, some starship stories. What they look like (based on science and science fiction). Sustainable starships, with the emphasis on the biology (reminiscent of Star Dragon, if I say so). I don’t know if there’s any backstory to this, but sounds like Russia sucks, arresting scientists for doing their job. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Hobbit Day is today, September 22, the fictional birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo. I read both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in 5th grade, back in the 1970s. I wrote a review of animated TV adaptation of The Hobbit for a school newspaper project that year as well, and some jealous asshole kid [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »>Einstein wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” I often see that quote held up not by scientists, of whom Einstein was one, but by folks who don’t [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>The reason we’ve probably never seen a dramatic TV series involving scientists in the tradition of ER or CSI or Newsroom is that the actual work is usual tedious, boring to most non-experts, with low stakes most of the time (cancer doesn’t get cured every week, or even nearly cured). This is also the reason [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>About 10-12 years ago, I had lunch with an old friend of mine who is a smart guy with degrees in astronomy, law, and has also sold stories to Analog, among other places. During our discussion, he proposed that things hadn’t fundamentally changed all that much since we’d grown up in the 1970s and 1980s. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »>Got a big pile today, some of them a little stale by internet standards, but super awesome! Is Obama more Klingon or Vulcan, and Captain Worf. At first I was like Vulcan! But then I reconsidered. I want to see a mixed Vulcan-Klingon character in a future Star Trek movie. And I think the link [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »>I’ve read and watched some good ones, but I’m sure I don’t know this interesting subfield as well as I should to be able to come up with a comprehensive list. Let me list some that I think are good to great, and solicit input from others about some that I may have missed. I’ve [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »>I’ve been reading a book called Epiphanies that is about, well, epiphanies people have had. One epiphany I had while reading it is that collecting stories from other people and making them into a book must be easier in some ways than actually writing a book yourself, and pays just as well if not better [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »>