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
I remember watching an episode of Cheers long ago in which they were arguing about Addams Family vs. The Munsters. And I was just reading a thread on Fark which was largely dominated by Star Wars vs. Star Trek. So I thought it would be fun to make a list. A lot of them are [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »>I only do these once a week, usually, because that helps me filter. Every day a dozen things seem really interesting, but after a few days, only a few from each day do. Of course, after a month, or a year, probably only a few of each week’s links still seem really interesting. Maybe I’ll [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »>Not at Comic-Con either? Photos to live vicariously by… Diablo on Diablo III. Rocky Kolb on CERN and the faster than light neutrinos, in hindsight. Basically, hey, here’s science at work, working. And here: the results about arsenic-based life are not confirmed. Sometimes the new hot result turns out to be wrong, but when entire [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>I have enjoyed the last decade of plentiful, quality superhero movies very much, and the few winners from earlier than that. After watching The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man recently, both of which I enjoyed, I was reminded of some things I see too often in such movies that is starting to annoy me whenever [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »>My wife and I finally made it to see The Amazing Spider-Man last night. It was pretty good, but suffered from being a reboot not so long after a pretty successful initial Spider-Man movie. I’m likely to also write a post soon about some traps superhero films fall into too often and I don’t want [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Working at our observatory last night on Jelm Mountain, and there was a new forest fire within ten miles. Yikes! Hope it gets under control. We could see the flames from the summit last night. Sounds like they’re 99.99995% sure they’ve detected the Higgs boson and will announce this week. James Inhofe and other conservative [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Neil DeGrasse Tyson investigates the space science of summer science fiction movies. That’s like three things I love all together in the same package! It’s not in depth, but he gets his digs in on Prometheus. And a video (INCLUDES SPOLERS) that is a perfect summary of my feelings on Prometheus (thanks Todd!): Alien [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>The more I think about it, the more I think Prometheus sucked. Onward with the starlinks… I’ve blogged about a similar notion, but consider here again What if everything is science fiction? (Wired) Faster-than-light neutrinos definitely not. Scientists make mistakes, and science corrects them. Atomic rockets, space colonies, and X-ray binaries. Legitimate concerns about global [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Let’s get started… Eight Modern Astronomy Mysteries Science Still Can’t Explain. It isn’t a bad list, but it needs revisions, in my opinion. Like instead of asking “How hot is dark matter?” which is a question I think we have a clue about, let’s just go with “What is Dark Matter?” Nice parallel to dark [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »>Normally I’m a purist about my superheroes. I want them dramatic and serious. Give me a brooding Batman over a wisecracking Spider-man, and get the hell out of town if you want to do a superhero sitcom. On the other hand, Robot Chicken broke me, and there’s a certain kind of superhero humor that works [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »>Guess that superheroes are the main theme of this week, so I’ll go with it. I saw someone on facebook asking what was the point of having a team of Avengers if Thor was around? Or the way he put it, “If you have a god on your team, why do you need a team?” [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »>I’ve seen a bunch of these lists on the heels of the success of the Avengers movie. Forbes has their top twenty (which dips into some bad ones in my opinion). io9 has their top ten comic book movies, which is unfortunately not restricted to superheroes (comparisons are apples and oranges too often). IGN has [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »>