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
Search
Sunday Starlinks
March 3rd, 2013
Big deadline on March 1 is past (Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline). New deadlines for some short stories.
Obama’s Star Wars/Trek Gaffe: Ridiculed by SF fans, and justified by super SF fans. Obama is not a big enough fan to deserve the somewhat obscure justification, in my opinion. (Thanks, Eric!)
A comet may hit Mars in 2014. A big one. This promises to be pretty cool although it’s still a longshot, and a reminder that it could happen to us. This is the defense spending that should be bloated and out of control. Another take on the story.
This has been floating around facebook recently and I know little about it except that it’s cool: an animation showing the solar system moving through the galaxy.
This is so cool…A real life version of a millionaire’s adventure quest, ala Ready Player One, designed to help inspire people to enjoy something the rich guy enjoyed. In this case, it’s a treasure chest hidden in the mountains outside of Santa Fe, NM. It’s even got its own cryptic set of clues in the form of a poem to solve like a riddle. We need Batman!
To save science, celebrate high-quality ignorance! Some sense in this.
20 Questions with the Space Station by Brian Malow.
The Science Fiction Fan’s Bucket List. I probably should have put on there something like reading all the award winners in the field, but there’s always room to add to the list.
Short one this week…there’s writing to do!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
With the announcement of the Martian comet impact coming within a month of a large meteor damaging a major city on the same day as another random asteroid made an extremely close pass to earth, I think it’s high time someone finally brings up Mike Flynn’s Firestar series. I read it last summer because I heard that it was a solid hard scifi series about the opening of near space through realistic, slower than light technology. Part of the plot involves the fact that asteroids are mysteriously changing their orbits to threaten earth, and the explanation involves an original take on alien intervention to “uplift” humanity into a space faring species.
Also,referring to the bucket list, does communicating to a chimp in sign language count as speaking with a non-human intelligence? I’ve come to understand that ignoring the success of Project Washoe and failing to see the vast differences between it and Project Nim, which was meant to debunk it, is high fashion among academics, but for bucket-listers secure in their sapience the ape option could help them meet the last item on the list.
The Mike Flynn series sounds interesting!
I guess I’d like to communicate with a chimp. That would be cool.
My Dad (bias alert!) was volunteering at the Washoe lab in my old hometown (bias alert defcon six!)and asked one of the chimps what the large tree bough the caretakers had drug into the enclosure was. The chimp gave the sign for ‘tree’ and immediately left my Dad in search of better conversation. I know that doesn’t quite match the inter-species conversation at the end of Spider Star, but it’ll have to do for now.
The chimp probably thought your dad wasn’t very smart!
Ha! Indeed. My Dad said he felt like the chimp responded as if it was thinking he was a dummy, whatever that means exactly. I’ve never been silently judged by a chimp, but it must not feel very good.