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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Saturday Starlinks

August 30th, 2008

This first link is potentially very, very interesting, and potentially reveals some very new and unsettling physics. Apparently radioactive decay rates measured in labs on Earth depend on the the distance from the sun. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283: Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance. Proposed explanations include the only relatively mundane — an unknown neutrino interaction — to the unsettling — a varying fine structure constant. Anyway, it’s one of those cool, intriguing results that indicates we’re on the verge of new knowledge. It’s still a big universe out there.

Also cool: unexpected monkeys! It’s still a big world out there.

Also cool: Street Corner Science. Nobel prizing winning physicist Leon Lederman gives people on the street the chance to ask him anything about science they want, and the results are videoed. It’s still a big city out there.

OK, not every story is about something cool. Sometimes there’s anger, or hate, or worse out there.

The anger: Fox is fighting Warner Brothers over some Watchmen rights, and trying to block the March release.

The hate: Jo Walton hates fantasy at tor.com.

And worse: Remember the stories about the dying bees, and the bogus Einstein’s quote, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” Well, Bayer Cropscience’s pesticide Clothianidin may be to blame, and they may have doctored their safety studies to get the product approved. Corporations or government dicking with science is one path to our extinction, and why I get so pissed off sometimes with the current administration in particular. You sort of expect corporations to put the dollar first, but our government is supposed to protect us.

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