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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Astronomy in Science Fiction: “Lobsters” by Charlie Stross
March 15th, 2009
First, I’m not picking on Charlie Stross particularly. It’s just that I’d been meaning to read his work for many years now, and finally got the chance with the purchase of a Kindle. In addition to a couple of his novels, I downloaded his award-nominated story “Lobsters” that I recall hearing many great things about.
It is an interesting story, which I enjoyed reading, and I think it would have blown me away when it first came out. Unfortunately it’s a case of being so good that you set the standard and then the original stuff doesn’t look so original in hindsight. Happened to Tolkien and Gibson, so Stross is in good company.
Anyway, I found this sentence regarding dark matter:
“They even found the dark matter–MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared–suspiciously high entropy leakage.”
There’s some stuff about most of Andromeda being sapient and I take it that this issue has a lot to do with the related stories that together make up Accelerando, which I have not read.
The sentence stopped me cold, however, and would have stopped me cold earlier this decade when the story came out.
In the 1990s there was a project, called the MACHO project, searching for the hypothesized MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) that might constitute the dark matter. Things like red dwarf stars, or maybe black holes. They found some, but far from enough. The vast majority of dark matter is not baryonic (normal matter found on the periodic table) and is not in MACHOs or red dwarf stars (see my primer on the current state of knowledge on dark matter, which was good in 2000 but has advanced even more since).
Now, it does take some time for information to percolate from the scientists to the science fiction writers and the general public, but the study was clearly taking place and Stross knew about the concept of MACHOs so I imagine he knew something about the project.
It just strikes me as ironic that someone who has issues with writing the near-future because of the fast-changing technology could blow it on something that was already known at the time.
For me, getting the science right is critically important. One aspect is educational. I don’t know how many sf readers think that dark matter is made up of halo red dwarf stars, but I suspect some do. The other is just the suspension of disbelief. While it is not unacceptable to write about the near-future and have it regarded as alternate history to future readers (see The Watchmen for an example, or most of Tom Clancy’s work), saying something that is just astronomically wrong is always going to throw me out of a story, and hopefully any astronomy students I’ve taught as well.
Anyway, take this as an interesting observation of the day, an excuse to go read or reread “Lobsters,” and to check out the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers before applications close.
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Stop calling “Watchmen” “The Watchmen”!
It’s like calling calling your books “The Star Dragon” or “The Spider Star”… or calling you “The Mike Brotherton”.
Mike – I was wondering if you’ve ever read Charlie Stross’s article on space colonisation at http://tinyurl.com/highfrontier? It’s from a while back, but it garnered a *lot* of reaction – like the hundreds of comments. As a working scientist, and given your particular field of expertise, I’d be particularly fascinated to know if you had any particular take on what he says there.
That link above doesn’t quite work, because somehow the web page included the question mark on the end of it, sorry … but if you take it out the link works just fine.
We can’t all be totally up to date on all the sciences. Still, astronomy is basic to a lot of SF, and I often spot errors. A certain well known writer not long ago had a draft novel with a well defined Venus with oceans–allowed within the parameter of the novel. But he also mentioned the oceans had no tides, a point I made him correct before it was published.
My own novel, started in 2006, has a character mentioning Jupiter has about 70 moons. The character was speaking from a 2009 perspective. Here we are, and ol’ Jupe is stuck at 63. So predictions/expectations don’t work out. Does that make “Time for Patriots” a bad book?
PS: I taught college astronomy for 32 years, so I make a real effort to be accurate.
Russ, I suppose you’re going to tell me to stop say “The Smashing Pumpkins,” too, now, eh?
Oh, and in Portuguese, you would say “The Mike Brotherton” sometimes, Russ.
Gary, that link to Stross’s page did come up in the past and I did look at it. I both agree and disagree with his sentiments. He was addressing some very wildly optimistic people and wanted to inject a little reality. At the same time, he never said space colonization would be impossible, just difficult and unlikely on some timescales that some people didn’t like. If I recall correctly.
Thomas, good for you on the tides thing! A lot of people forget that the sun has an affect, which would be larger for Venus.
And the way I’d handle the Jupiter thing writing for such a near future is to say something correct but less exact like “more than 60” or “many dozens” or “60-70, depending on your definition of a moon.”
It is hard to keep up with things like this, but there’s something fundamentally different about this sort of mistake and one about predicting technological or social change.
Hi. The Romania Science-Fiction & Fantasy Society salute you.
Best regards from Romania
Thank you, Sorin! Someday I will visit!