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
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Learning to Love the Future

March 31st, 2008

Humans are not all alike.

That is a truism that’s so obvious that many of us don’t seem to consider it regularly enough on a daily basis. Myself, for instance. I like to solve problems using reason and science, objective methods with objective measures for success. And in many arenas, those methods work. My understanding of science extends to technology, and seeing its possibilities, and how it doesn’t control us, but we who control it. It’s up to us to avoid the pitfalls to achieve the promise. Technology doesn’t inevitably lead to anything.

But I wanted to talk about extremes of people and their attitudes toward technology and the future. I’m not the most extreme pro-tech optimist out there.

Here is the promise for the real technophiles: sexbots.

After I noticed that article last week, I came across a spate of things about fear of technology. I mean, not just “the machines are going to take our jobs” Luddite crap, but honest-to-god”we’re not meant to do that and shouldn’t do that” stuff. Nanotechnology is feared, with 70% by one survey finding it morally unacceptable, even though I don’t think people understand it’s already everywhere in small ways (pun irresistible).

Then we have people taking the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to court because of fears that black holes might be created that will eat the Earth. I think those fears (and those of producing ’strangelets’) are vastly overstated since higher energy collisions occur in the upper atmosphere regularly and have been for eons, even if we don’t yet understand the physics the LHC will open up for us.

Some people have a conservatism, that likely has survival value, not to try everything new under the sun. At least not to trust it right away. I have no problem with caution. I just have problems with irrational caution, and fear as an end conclusion.

There are some legitimate fears. Apparently a group of malfeasants attacked internet forums where epileptics gather using strobing gif images capable of inducing seizures in some people. Shades of Snowcrash, there.

The truth is that we cannot support the world’s population without our technology, and we likely cannot support the population of the world in the future without new technology. The reason that the Population Bomb and other Malthusian-style catastrophe’s don’t happen is a combination of new technology and economics. We don’t run out of resources, ever — we switch to cheaper ones when they’re developed or when they become cheaper. It may be that there are “Black Swans” out there, like an asteroid impact or the end of oil (if fear of nuclear power isn’t too strong), that are not so effortlessly avoided. We haven’t seen them yet, but we will if we don’t learn to love the future.

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