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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
Snappy Starlinks
December 3rd, 2008
Roger Ebert slams Ben Stein’s Expelled! Ebert is a sharper guy than I thought. An easy target, but a great take down. That dreadful peace of ignorant propaganda spewed forth by the Creationists could be added to the reasons why atheists are angry. Then there’s this guy.
Geek books (read science fiction here) that should (not) be made into movies. Drop of the hat to my post about great sf books that shouldn’t be made into movies.
A couple of seriously cool astronomy links. Top ten Hubble photos, as a video. Also, Tycho’s supernova echoes on in deep space.
Transylvanian “Whopper Virgins” exploited? I mean, if this is offensive and insensitive, what do you call Dracula? The criticisms of the campaign seem to revolve around the notion that you shouldn’t wave fast food under the noses of poor, rural people. What do you think?
Honestly, this is not a problem compared to ripping out their throats and bathing in their blood, is it?
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December 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am
so, are you equating creationists, or the belief in creationism, with killing kids? perhaps i’m missing something somewhere. or perhaps those weren’t meant to be in the same paragraph.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Not equating them, no, but they are both cases where superstitious beliefs lead to irrational and destructive behavior. Shouldn’t a rational person without superstitious beliefs be angry about both?
December 6th, 2008 at 9:55 am
that’s assuming that creationism is a suspicious belief. i know it’s a belief that makes you gag like rotten eggs, but there’s a large difference between voodoo witch doctor, and ben stein, who easily has one of the highest IQs, probably in the country. i’ve heard somewhere in between 195 and 228, and i was a fan of win ben stein’s money. not saying that being smart makes you right, but that maybe they have some more well thought out reasons then a guy who would have a significantly lower IQ.
(this paragraph isn’t really in line with my point, i’m just playing devil’s advocate here)
also, not that i agree with the witchdoctor or find his actions justifiable (he probably deserves whatever’s coming to him), even though i’m now setting up a defense for him, but: 1. i would not be surprised at all to find out that this has been a centuries old practice, that we have just recently come to hear about as the world becomes less and less secluded to itself. 2. what he was doing probably makes a lot of sense in his particular frame of reference. not that i think all religion is inherently true or anything, but, put simply, if X religion didn’t yield some kind of beneficial Y results, it wouldn’t exist. so, while we in the west would call him a villain, and his (perhaps) increasingly westernized village/town/country would start to call him a villain, i bet the same thing practiced in, say, 1600 (just random date) that we would have never heard about would have been applauded by his people. they would have mourned the loss of children, but at least there were no witches.
i guess that’s the difference i was seeing. one is a smart man coming to a conclusion based on an assortment of facts, and the other is a third world man making a purely religious conclusion based on a fistful of kind of facts, but mostly traditional beliefs that have no way of being verified.
i suppose the last little piece i would offer is that people will find a justification to kill people no matter what the ruling belief of the day would dictate. the problem in saying that evolution made it easy for hitler to do the things he did (which maybe it did) is it then makes the counter argument that obviously, some “not-evolution” based belief structure would make killing difficult, if not impossible… which it didn’t (see: inquisition, jihad). the problem isn’t inherently the belief, it’s people.
sorry to kind of keep rambling. i slept lousy, and it’s kind of making a freeform thought process, but i believe i expressed myself coherently.
December 6th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Creationism is not based on evidence of any sort, is not science of any sort, and Expelled is only a vehicle to tarnish science and equate evolution to Hitler. Stein is saying evolution is the problem, not the people. You disagree with Stein youseelf. Bein Stein remains a Nixon lover and has said that scientists are murderers — how smart is he again? He definitely has an intellectual capability, but it is in the service of moronic and misguided intent which makes it worse than stupid — it makes the man evil in my book. You’ve seen him regurgitate factoids on his game show and think he’s smart. Well, maybe smart in the Nixonesque kind of way that lacks wisdom or understanding. We could write a test, the two of us together, that Stein couldn’t pass because of his irrational limiting beliefs.
There is NO difference in the “reasoning” behind Stein and the witch doctor. Their beliefs are driving their actions in both cases, beliefs totally unsupported by science of any kind. One apparently murders kids, and one wants to undermine their education and the entire enterprise of science. I’m angry about both of them for very sound reasons.
Smart people believe all sorts of wrong and irrational things. Don’t let that “smart” label think their position has any actual merit just because they can baffle with a little bullshit. Really smart people can reconsider their positions and change their minds. Stein can’t or won’t, and continues to make outrageous unsupportable claims.