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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...
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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
Alien Sociology
March 27th, 2008
Seth Shostak over at space.com has a nice article today mostly about why aliens won’t visit the Earth. I agree with the vast majority of his assessments, and the one reason he proposes that they would. As he points out, most “aliens coming to Earth” stories (at least on TV and in the movies) are stupid. Star Trek, however, seems to fit this reasoning pretty well in most cases.
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March 27th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
This is interesting, but doesn’t really come to grips with the problem that aliens are… well, alien. We can’t know how they think or why they might do what they do.
March 27th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
True, to some extent. But we know they’d have no reason to come here for our water, for instace, which just made “V” stupid. OK, one thing that made “V” stupid. And the mating. And the Earth food. “V” was just stupid all around from a science viewpoint.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Maybe the human anus is the most beautiful thing in the whole galaxy, and so they have to keep coming here and probing all those abductees.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Maybe worlds with multicellular life are very rare, rare enough that one example is worth study (That will tend to space out civilizations, of course).
Hal Clement had the aliens overlook Earth even though there were lots of FTL-enabled civilizations because the aliens were all from K and M stars. They knew that suns as massive as the sun evolve too quickly for it to be likely for complex life to appear.
As I recall, this meant the aliens thought of us as impervious to radiation and were a bit unclear if that just meant UV or if Xrays were included as well.
They’d also never seen anything made of molten water. Everyone else used water/ammonia, methane or some other fluid. I think Clement wanted the red dwarf worlds out far enough to avoid tidelocking.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
[...] may have noticed me linking to some of Seth’s articles in the past, sometimes responding at length or just a brief mention in [...]