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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What If Science Fiction Actually Involved Science?
September 20th, 2012
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 that the science and engineering on shows like Star Trek and Stargate usually resorts to quick technobabble followed by 30 seconds of fiddling to solve problems. Realistic pondering, testing, failure, and more pondering in real time is kind of exciting to do, but boring to watch, especially when many viewers cannot be expected to have deep scientific backgrounds.
Still, I’d like to see more attempts to pull it off. Science can be powerful and exciting and there are a lot of talented writers who could pull off more realistic stories without cheating the subject matter or their audiences.
A couple of great movies where the realities of science and technology were handled well and realistically were October Sky and Apollo 13. I wish there were a lot more I could think of, and movies that were science fiction rather than historical dramas. One that tried and had some partial success was Enemy Mine, dealing with language differences and meteor strikes (although the latter was not that realistic, it did display rational problem solving). Others I’m not thinking of?
Anyway, I think I’m struggling with science fiction as speculation/entertainment, vs. the idea that science fiction can actually productively exploit the process of science itself and make it an interesting element on its own merits, instead of just enabling a world we can escape to. I always loved novels where the characters found themselves on alien worlds and had to experiment with their environment or alien technology to figure out how to survive. I’ve rarely seen that in the forefront of TV shows or movies.
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I would propose that ‘Regenesis’ does qualify: there was at least a modicum of science.
“Numbers” was more like CSI I suppose, but at least mentioned some genuine mathematics.
I do not believe you can expect a realistic portrayal of the time frame of science, any more than you can expect a realistic portrayal of most events in life.
just my .02 yoctocents.
I recently watched Robinson Crusoe on Mars and was pleasantly surprised by how attentive it was to what was known of Mars at the time. When the ship was in flight stars did not flash by in the background and a noble attempt was made at portraying zero gravity. It even had several moments of in situ resource utilization near the beginning.
I thought “Contact” the movie did a pretty good job of portraying astronomers even though it did have to invoke some pretty fanciful stuff in order to make the story compelling.
What I really loved about Douglas Trumbull’s movie “Brainstorm” is how it showed the refinement of the technology involved: From a big bulky thing that needed to be put on a cart in order to make it portable, and needed for the electronics to be kept supercooled with liquid nitrogen; through ever-smaller iterations to, finally, a slim headset, thanks to the advent of room-temperature superconducting IC chips!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
This is my pick.
Contact is pretty good, yeah, and it sounds like I should watch Brainstorm, and perhaps Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
I’ll have to find out what Regenisis is, haven’t heard of it.
Numbers suffered some CSI-like problems, yeah, where it goes fast and looks easy, when in practice small-number statistics ought to bite you in the ass a lot more often than I saw on that show.
There are plenty of sci-fi books that deal with such subjects.
Imho, the difference between sci-fi is HUGE between books and cinema/tv.
btw, on the other side of the spectrum, already talked a lot on this blog, is bad science in movies.
and just yesterday I got so angry with the movie Battleship that I turned it off.
So, they sent this signal to Gliese 581g, 22 light years away. They do that in 2006 (and the signal RIDICULOUSLY looks like a Death Star beam) and I think 4 years later the aliens are responding to that signal by invading Earth.
I am ok with aliens having FTL tech. But how the hell did the human transmission/laser/whatever reach Gliese in less than 4 years???
Pathetic. The writer has no idea what 22 ly mean.
I think Aces is right that there’s a huge difference between what works in a book and what works on a screen. You can have a paragraph in a book summarising a month of calculations and experimentation that led to the next bit of plot being possible, but that doesn’t work in a film. If your scientist is working at a computer running simulations this doesn’t lead to a very exciting montage.
The TV show Big Bang Theory played with the idea brilliantly in one episode. Two of the characters were knuckling down to serious work with The Eye of the Tiger playing in the background. The montage showed them staring at equations on a whiteboard thinking. That’s probably a lot more realistic than most science montages.