Spider Star by Mike Brotherton
A Race Against Time To Disable A Weapon In The Heart Of A Sun
Oct 18, 2008
Mike Brotherton's Spider Star is a big, old-fashioned Space Opera published in March 2008 by Tor Books (448pp, ISBN 9780765311252), which has ship-load's of real science at its core, adding a welcome grounding to what could otherwise be an escapist romp.
The Argonauts
Four centuries in the future mankind has spread to the stars, including to the Pollux system, a red-giant star thirty-four light years from Earth which is orbited by Argo, site of both a human colony and repository of the remains of a lost civilization, the Argonauts.
While on a routine training exercise on Charybdis, Argo's inner moon, an exploration team finds a sunken chamber complete with alien artefact, which team leader Manuel Rusk touches.
Pollux begins to emit intermittent streams of superheated plasma dubbed Lashings by the colony's media. The Lashings strike a moon first, turning it into a boiling world of lava, a "junior version of hell." (p54) A device within Pollux is identified as the trigger for the Lashings, which soon begin to strike Argo.
The Spider Star
Based on an ancient text from a vanished race called the Argonauts, the likely source of the weapon is identified, and an expedition prepared; their mission is to reach the Spider Star --an artificial planetoid seventeen light years away-- and to return with a way of deactivating the weapon.
Rusk is unhappy that legendary space-scout Frank Klingston is made Mission Director, and the men's different working styles threaten the mission when they reach the Spider Star, and contact is made with aliens on the vast, eight-armed structure.
Before very long, Klingston, Rusk, and his second in command and sometime lover Sloan Griffin are split up and fighting for their lives aboard the Star against overwhelming forces that are best indifferent and at times actively hostile to them. To even survive, let alone find the aliens who created the weapon and negotiate its disarmament seems an almost impossible task.
Mike Brotherton
A review about three years ago in F&SF by Robert Kilheffer lamented the state of American SF. There are signs that with the emergence of Paul Melko, Will McIntosh, Ted Kosmatka and now Brotherton, that a corner may have been turned.
Brotherton is a Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy based at the University of Wyoming, whose first novel Star Dragon was published in 2003. Brotherton's close involvement with celestial bodies is clear from his easy facility with concepts that mark the novel out as Hard SF (that is rigorously scientific - so no Faster Than Light interstellar travel).
There are echoes of the Golden Age of SF, particularly of Arthur C. Clarke -- scenes such as Rusk's 're-birth' brought to mind Dave Bowman's transformation in 2001: A Space Odyssey, while the exploration of the Spider Star itself was reminiscent of Rendezvous With Rama.
If there's any criticism of Spider Star, it's that at times Brotherton's understandable enthusiasm for extrapolation and scientific rigour sometimes almost gets in the way of the story, but for the most part he reins in that enthusiasm. The result is that Spider Star is an engaging and often thought-provoking read, peppered with Big Ideas, peopled with characters who engage, and with a cast of memorable but truly alien aliens.
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