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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"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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There are spoilers ahead concerning the story “Neutron Star” by Larry Niven. Be warned. If you want to download and read the story for under a dollar, check it out on fictionwise.com. If you’re not going to jump out and read the story any time soon, you can familiarize or remind yourself about it at […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »>Following up my recent post on this topic, I came across another really nice one, although a bit low-tech, very similar to a book I used to have and use back in the 1990s when the web wasn’t so dense. Credits to Eric Nylund for this one, which he uses when writing Halo novels: Atlas […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>I’ve discussed some world building before, and this has traditionally been an important topic in science fiction and fantasy. I want to get a little more specific where it comes to space-based interstellar science fiction. These days I think it’s becoming necessary to be very specific in any human-based, Earth-oriented future to use real astronomy […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>Maybe this is in bad taste. I don’t know. I don’t care too much. There are some weird looking actors out there who have gotten a lot of work over the years. They’re not ugly. They’re “Hollywood Ugly” which means you don’t scream when you see them and there’s something about the way they look […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »>There’s an article about artificial limbs with a picture of an attractive woman, a double-amputee, running along the beach. The premise of the article is that some artificial limbs are starting to outperform original limbs, in at least some ways. This trend will continue into the future, no doubt, until we have the capability to […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »>I’m not big on poetry as a rule. It’s a taste I think. I like rock and roll, but not country. I like colas, but not coffee. And I prefer novels to short stories, and short stories to poetry. I think I’ve always been more enamored of the idea of something than its presentation, although […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>New Scientist has an interesting article about novel methods for interstellar travel, which includes links to recent scientific articles: In August, physicist Jia Liu at New York University outlined his design for a spacecraft powered by dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1). Soon afterward, mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan proposed plans […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>I am thankful for the Man-Kzin wars. I am thankful for psychohistory. I am thankful for the World of Tiers. I am thankful for robots. I am thankful for artificial gravity. I am thankful for ray guns, blasters, lasers, phasers, and photon torpedoes. I am thankful for space elevators, bean stalks, skyhooks, and the Fountains […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »>My friend and fellow astronomer/science fiction writer Valentin Ivanov pointed me at these abstracts saying they reminded him of Star Dragon (which has creatures living in an accretion disk): Title: Accretion disk civilization 1: Habitable zone around accretion disks at galactic nuclei. Authors: Fukue, J. Publication: Astron. Her., Vol. 88, No. 5, p. 199 – 205 […]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>This is just going to be a short post tonight on a topic I have discussed before and will likely continue to discuss. Politics in the United States has become so polarized that few politicians cross party lines. It is one team vs. the other, rather than real issues with real solutions that are not […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »>Sometimes synchronicty strikes, and you see a bunch of things related to each other by chance. Well, usually not exactly by chance, but it seems that way. For today, let’s just say that I’m always interested in why smart people do dumb things, what it means to be smart, and how we decide to operate […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »>There seems to be a little, but not very much. I mean, if we go way back, we have the word robot: “The acclaimed Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938) made the first use of the word ‘robot’, from the Czech word for forced labor or serf. Capek was reportedly several times a candidate for the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »>