Putting The Science in Science Fiction

For anyone who likes their science fiction so hard you could use it to carve your initials in a diamond, check out Mike Brotherton's free anthology, Diamonds in the Sky. Brotherton, an astronomy professor and novelist, got funding from the National Science Foundation to put together a free online anthology of sci-fi stories that get their facts right even as they explore strange new futures. Contributors include Brotherton himself, Alexis Lynn Gleitner, and SciNoFi pal Kevin Grazier. A few of the tales come off on the didactic side — a talking dog literally asks for an explanation of dark matter as a distraction from the plot problems at hand — but others smoothly intertwine science and story telling. The Moon is a Harsh Pig brought wit and verve to an explanation of the moon's phases, and In the Autumn of Empire was an amusing tale that let the author vent ...