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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
Ten Issues for Hard Science Fiction
September 8th, 2008
There are a number of issues that continue to keep coming up in hard science fiction, or any science fiction trying to get the facts right. I just helped my collaborator here a few days ago answer a reporter’s questions on one of these (humans expelled into space without space suits). These things should always be right. There’s no excuse in this day and age. We’ll start with the space expulsion.
1. Human exposure to vacuum. People don’t blow up. And probably most aliens don’t, either. A number of movies/TV shows get this right: 2001, Battlestar Galactica, Event Horizon. Some don’t (e.g. Outland). Get it right.
2. FTL. Faster than light travel. It’s a trope of the field. It should be recognized that this is typically necessary for interstellar and even interplanetary travel if characters are doing it in Vipers or X-wings without bathrooms, or for any short timespan. That’s a start. But it should be acknowledged and some excuse given, at a minimum. In the most rigorous cases, writers should realize that FTL implies time travel or at least non-causal effects and has philosophical implications about free will.
3. Teleportation. It’s not just for Nightcrawler. It may or may not violate light-speed and causality depending on the implementation, but it should be recognized that it needs to be handled carefully. If conservation laws are violated, it could be used to create perpetual motion machines and infinite energy. If not, things get more interesting. How are energy differences made up? Think about it. Get it right, or give some lip service to the problems.
4. The Fermi Paradox. Why aren’t aliens common in the universe and already in abundant evidence here on Earth? There are at least 50 possible reasons. Have one if you’re dealing with aliens in the galaxy and space travel, or if you’ve got humans exploring the galaxy and there are no aliens. It doesn’t have to be a big part of the story, but have a reason.
5. The Singularity. On the short timescale, technology is slower than we expect (a few years or a decade or two). On somewhat longer timescales, it goes fast. Humans think linearly, not exponentially. How far ahead can you really imagine? OK, take that timeframe, and add a few thousand years. Or a million. Where are we then? Can’t imagine it? Neither can anyone else. Don’t worry about it too much. Write your story, but be aware of the issue.
6. The dangers and difficulties of the space environment. Radiation. Lack of gravity. Sex. Getting sick.
7. Alien communication. This isn’t necessarily easy. Acting like it is may move the story along, but it isn’t realistic. Maria Doria Russel wrote a great book in The Sparrow over misunderstanding aliens, as have others, but many have not. Don’t pull a Star Trek on this. You don’t have to create a great story about language exchange like Barry Longyear did with “Enemy Mine,” but again, lip service at a minimum. Dot your “i”s and cross your “t”s.
8. Alien chemistry/biology. Can we eat aliens? Can they eat us? Is DNA the only system for living things? Are our amino acids common to life, or are we just a subset of the possibilities. I’m not saying I know the answers for sure for these questions, although I have ideas, but you better know the answers for your universe and they should be plausible.
9. AI. Artificial intelligence. Strong or weak, we’ll have some version in the future. Which? What can it do? What can’t it do? Note that this is related to the singularity issue, and other things like post-human existence. Is it possible to download humans? Or make simulations that are for all practical purposes alive and independent? I don’t know the answers, but you have to make some decisions if you’re writing sf, because some version of this technology will be with us.
10. Nanotech. Variations on it are coming, or are here already. We’re gaining the ability to manipulate matter on the atomic level to build novel materials and structures. What’s possible? What isn’t? Nanotech isn’t magic, and like teleportation, keep in mind conservation laws regarding mass and energy. Also, as a guide, keep in mind biological systems that are nature’s nanotech. In principle, nanotech can operate very quickly and you can use bacteria as a guide for what’s possible.
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September 9th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Great list.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
[...] Brotherton takes a look at “Ten Issues for Hard Science Fiction,” but its basically a list of Star Trek buzz words. The real issue: Can we escape the [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Excellent summary Mike, I’m particularly sensitive to the singularity. Any story set in the future can look absurd without comprehending this.
For example, what’s the difference between telepathy and having a cellphone embedded in your head? The answer is not much. So unless characters in the future have “telepathy” the writer is pretty much ignoring a reasonable projection of future technology. Vernor Vinge really nailed the new telepathy in Rainbows End.
December 18th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I just finished Alastair Reynolds new book “House of Suns” in which he tries to get around the causality paradox (in this case FTL via wormholes). I am curious at what you think about his solution, if you have had time to read this “Hard SF”, expansive novel.
I am wondering if it is consistent with the current state of physics and cosmology.
Bill
December 18th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I have read some Alastair Reynolds, and enjoy him, but not HOUSE OF SUNS. He has a PhD in astronomy like I do, so is likely aware of all the issues and the current state of the art. I doubt there’s a clean way to really get around this, however, except in a philosophical “there is no time” sense.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I would think that a good writer need be very aware of current trends in technology and physics. For instance some of Einstein’s theories are being, if not challenged, then modified. Take for instance several experiments that have proven faster than light actualities. Then there’s quantum mechanics phenomena where two atoms at distance can ‘communicate’ reactions. Or that other fun thing where atoms have spontaneously ‘appeared’ from nowhere (another dimension ?). Hopefully the LHC will show us even more interesting tricks in physics.
Any of those concepts can be interwoven in a story and built upon, I’d think. Imagination is just a fancy way of saying…”we’ll get there someday”.
June 8th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Re: No.9
The continuing evolution of artificial intelligence (or the supposed singularity) will throw up huge philosophical problems. Does an AI with the exact memory and intelligence of a human be afforded the same human rights? Would it even consider itself to be equally sentient? And if so should we consider it to be such?
Alastair Reynolds deals with this issue superbly in The Prefect.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:18 pm
These questions essentially negate a lot of SF written to date; they point towards a post-human future which we can only understand as allegory. Or a universe in which we are rats in the walls.
Here’s how I deal with them.
1. Vacuum. I have no problem with people not exploding. (remember Earthlight by Clarke?)
2. FTL. I actually prefer the ‘no empires’ sublight space travel; the galaxy is only a single human lifespan edge to edge at a single continuous G of accelleration I recall reading in Analog 20 years ago. Sure, that’s thousands of years for the stay at homes. So what? Space travel is a one way trip into the future.
3. Teleportation. If we posit extra dimensions to siphon energy into and out of we can balance any equation. True, we get free zero point energy. So that has to be part of that story. Teleportation means ‘post scarcitiy.’
4. Fermi. There are many possible answers; some violate the principal of mediocrity (the notion that one should assume that where you are isn’t a special magical place) some violate what we know about the drake equation and the age of the universe. (Our light cone should be filled with dyson spheres; it isn’t.) The actual observed universe we exist in is stranger than science fiction; we are either the first, the only, or…berserkers. I prefer the notion of some sort of leaky quarantine, a la star trek.
5. The singularity. Unless we posit AI the singularity just means really fast technological progress. It’s manageable as an idea. Once you have superhuman self-modifying intelligences, you’re staring into the sun and writing allegory again.
6 AI, immortality, uploading downloading and all that jazz. I suspect that us meat people will occupy a niche similar to the blue green algae that created the oxygen that allowed all subsequent life to be so zippy and wonderful. The algae, for their eras of toil, were relegated to stinky bogs here and there. The only way to write stories where humans are at all interesting or in charge is to have us enslaving our betters via some sort of super-potent asimovian brainwashing. This seems unlikely as well as icky.
Moravec came to the idea in Mind Children that perhaps the AIs would like space, and we would dick around at the bottom of gravity wells. Why not? There are no monocultures in nature. Again, the real question is what is our niche?
Immortality and transcendence: uploading and modifying your own intelligence, becoming the AI, is an interesting notion; again, we are left to describe the super-intelligent experience with our own, normal intelligence.
Nanotech: AI, nanotech, and the singularity with uploading and downloading essentially melt reality into any form you want. The problem is, again, why would that form create stories we could tell? Why would its visuals, its tactiles, its shape and substance be resolvable into narrative?
I think most SF now hovers at the edge of the singularity, dipping into it, orbiting it; touching it and dancing away, in such a way as to keep characters human and sympathetic.
The singularity is so much closer than space travel that again, it seems that humans don’t go to the stars; our mind children do.
Some people can write SF in this environment. I have a very hard time doing so, other than the near future, edge of the singularity stuff. Which means space travel is closed off to me, which is a shame.
Jay
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Jaques Vallee became interested in UFOs when he found technicians at radar installations spontaneously destroying tapes of tracked objects which didn’t correspond to known aircraft flights. They weren’t told to. They did it instinctively.
This is why UFOs are so interesting; they are objects of ridicule and humiliation. As Darwin was pilloried as an ape man, UFO researchers are called ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘buffs’ and are taunted with the term ‘little green men.’ Some of these guys have a lifetime of aviation experience; they can do some science; they work with the sighting data trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and if it’s venus, they say it’s venus.
The real reason UFOs are ignored is that they are a cosmic insult. They don’t want to interact with us in ways that would categorically prove their existence. It would be effortless for them to leave behind irrefutable traces. They behave in many ways like unfalsifiable phenomena. If they are ET, then ET is treating us like animals.
One of the notions is that we are being systematically culturally desensitized to the idea of aliens to prevent societal collapse when The Horrible Truth emerges. (They don’t want us to become a Cargo Cult.)
June 24th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Wrong post on the UFOs, Jay? Want to copy it over to the new post?