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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Really Great Interactive Space Map
February 21st, 2013
Here’s the link: http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
It’s for Google’s chrome browser but works well on my firefox.
One of the things that was hard in science fiction, hell, astronomy for that matter, was visualizing in 3-D the layout of the stars in the local neighborhood. Now our technology makes that easy. Play with it and enjoy!
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You’re right. It’s terrific. Mouse wheel scroll doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, but there’s a scroll bar anyway. I wish I’d had this a couple of years ago. I spent many hours with star charts and a calculator trying to visualise a small fraction of what this shows. A nice extra function would be to refocus the map on an arbitrary star to get distances and angles to any other star. Also, it does need more named stars. Also, downloading all the star data every time you take a look is pretty naff when your “broadband” is as slow as mine (a local caching option would be easy enough to implement).