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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Super-Interesting Starlinks

December 16th, 2008

First, the trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Unfortunately, it looks pretty traditional Hollywood to me, with all the good and bad that that implies.

Dante banned from selling his soul on Ebay, as Ebay forbids the sale of anything non-physical. The deal is actually sort of interesting, involving a payback for future artistic success. Could be a model for modern patronage of the arts.

Super-interesting science result from my field: exploting gravitational microlensing to study the accretion disk around a supermassive black hole of a distant quasar. This is a rare and challenging observation, but it may be possible to do again in other lensed systems.

New thoughts about why there are no new Einsteins. Basically the related problems of the growth and effectiveness of group science (at the expense of individual achievement), as well as the increasing knowledge base required to be assimilated before starting original work. I’d also like to point out the really stupid thinking and how science reporters writing interesting articles like this one also screw up the public. Just because there was 200 years between Einstein and Newton doesn’t mean that the next great physicist should be expected 200 years after Einstein. Why should such a thing be periodic in a simple way? Shouldn’t it depend on the number of people with the education and opportunity to enter physics? That number was tiny in Newton’s day, quite a bit larger in Einstein’s, and larger even today. The reporter just made a lot of good points about the problems in recognizing a great individual physicist today, and then threw out all that careful thought in favor of a simple periodicity with not a shred of evidence in support of it except for vague numerology.

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