The Sunborn

Adventures of Viktor & Julia #2

by Gregory Benford

Their historic mission to Mars made Julia and Victor the most famous astronauts of all time. Now, decades later, they are ordered by the Consortium to Pluto, where they will rendezvous with another starship led by the brilliant, arrogant Captain Shanna Axelrod. Here, on the frozen ammonia shore of Pluto's methane sea, Shanna has discovered intelligent creatures thriving in the -300 degree temperatures. But even as their findings shift from the amazing to the inconceivable, the two crews must overcome their own intense rivavlry to work together. For the most remote reaches of the solar system are filled with unimaginable wonders...and countless forces that will crush all human life.
- The author's most recent hardcover for Aspect, Beyond Infinity (0-446-53059-X), was published in 3/04. His previous Aspect novel, The Martian Race, was published in hardcover in 1999 and paperback in 2001, and has netted almost 50,000 combined copies. It was a Locus magazine Recommended Book of the Year.
- Aspect is publishing the six titles in Benford's classic Galactic Center series in new mass market editions: In the Ocean of Night (2/04), Across the Sea of Suns (3/04), Great Sky River (8/04), Tides of Light (9/04), Furious Gulf (2/05), and Sailing Bright Eternity (3/05).
- Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, and he is the recipient of two Nebula Awards, the United Nations Prize for Literature, and the 1995 Lord Prize for his contributions to science, among many other honors.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Hard Science Fiction, Novels, Audiobook

336 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2005

About the author

Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.

Reviews

[Paul Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Alien tongues could be outlandish not merely in vocabulary and grammatical rules but in their semantic swamps. Mute cultural or even biological premises wove into even the simplest of sentences … .”

“Could even the most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta Stone?”

As one of the most well-known authors in the sci-fi genre, past or present, Gregory Benford is almost certainly aware of John Campbell’s oft-quoted dictum regarding alien beings and alien intelligence. As editor ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, Campbell wanted his authors to create much more than mere humanoid aliens or anthropomorphized extra-terrestrial creatures. He wanted authors to “Write [him] a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.”

In THE SUNBORN, a hardest of the hard sci-fi novels that will challenge even the most hardcore lovers of the genre, Benford rose to Campbell's demands and created a first contact drama that takes place beyond Pluto and in the Oort Cloud at the fringes of man’s knowledge of our solar system.

“Though the galaxy appears to be a swirling pinwheel of light, most of it is nothing. Emptiness. Utter black oblivion … yet stars, those brimming balls of radiance, continually spew forth matter which fills the void. The starwind streams out, expelled by snarling magnetic storms.”

This is not a novel that will appeal to newbies testing the waters of the sci-fi genre. But hard-core long-term sci-fi fans will find themselves raising their eyebrows with the evocative challenge of Benford’s unique ideas and suggestions as to the spectacular possibilities for life NOT as we know it in forms and places we could hardly have conceived of!

Recommended with the caveat that all readers should set aside distractions and read carefully with exquisite attention. Benford’s creations in THE SUNBORN will take all of the analytical thought, logical and scientific knowledge you can muster!

Paul Weiss

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a single word, the review for this book would be: colossal infodump.

Gregory Benford is a physicist, and he knows what he is writing about. He is careful to chalk out his imagined worlds in detail, with accurate astronomic references and the correct scientific details regarding fusion drives. Even in biology, which is not his chosen field of activity, he takes painstaking care in the interests of veracity. And in the case of extraterrestrial beings, he has ensured that even his speculations are solidly grounded in science.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with this book. In the 436 pages, around half is dedicated to exposition. The story hardly gets moving before the author has to insert himself and start explaining things to us. Even for me, somewhat of a science nerd, this was overkill - I found myself dropping off many a time, and telling the author: "Come on, get with it!" I can imagine this would be torture for a person without a science background.

The story follows Julia and Viktor, an astronaut husband-and-wife team in the employ of the Consortium, a private enterprise which took over the Mars mission after NASA abandoned it after an accident. John Axelrod, the CEO of the Consortium, wants them to move to Pluto to help his astronaut daughter Shanna, who is encountering unexpected problems. At the same time, things on Mars are also getting interesting with the surprising discovery of sentience in the fungal growth called "Marsmat" on the planet.

On pluto, Julia and Shanna battle personality problems as they and their crew grapple with alien life of a type and scale unimaginable. They must come up with unique solutions to save themselves and humanity in general.

As I said before - as far as hard science goes, this novel is a goldmine. And the the kind of extraterrestrial life imagined is absolutely mind-blowing: and logical. But as a story, it sucks big time. Maybe it would have been different had I read the first book in the series, The Martian Race, first.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Might move my rating from 3 Stars to a higher rating after some thinking. Definitely better than Viktor and Julia #1, but you do have to read that one first. Inventive and intriguing ways of imagining life beyond Earth. The aliens and first contact pose interesting questions on how do you recognize intelligence. And how can each other's actions be misinterpreted. Are moral, philosophical, scientific, language, even religious concepts a shared result of intelligence? He makes fun of atheists, who believe the universe is a joke on humanity, he posits that Christians will have an impossible time reconciling a "Savior" of mankind with alien races--must there be Redeemers for each alien race? Muslims and Jews may not have an easy time either but Hindus and Buddhists would probably be fine with alien races. He takes time to caricature "scientists" who raise controversies only to be sure they get the funding to "study" these controversies, like today's global warmers. The book has a feeling of a tie-in to his"Galactic Center" series. I wish he had spent less time on human interactions and more on the science of how life could develop and thrive in the various venues he raises.

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

_The Sunborn_ by Gregory Benford is an excellent "hard" science fiction novel, set in the year 2044, a future in which humans live in stations orbiting the Earth, on the Moon, and have had for around two decades a scientific research station on Mars. Though the only ones who live on Mars are scientists, engineers, support personnel, and administrators, the time is coming soon when settlers will begin arriving in earnest, aided by improved surface habitats on Mars, bioengineered life forms that can survive in domes, capable of handling the reduced sunlight, increased ultraviolet radiation (even with shielding), still relatively thin air, harsh Martian soil (even after it has been turned into soil of a type usable by terrestrial plants), and reduced gravity.

Also aiding the appeal of the Red Planet are the lives, trials, and tribulations of the Martian explorers themselves, nearly every moment of their lives visible to many millions of people, thank in part due to the evolving culture (an outgrowth of today's reality TV and 24-hour media cycles) but also in part because that while there is a strong governmental and scientific component to Martian (and solar system) exploration, there is also a very strong commercial component as well, outgrowths of such incentives into space as the X-Prize and the fact that private industry has such a huge role off the Earth's surface. Corporations and consortiums involved in the solar system relentlessly seek profit in their expeditions, exploiting everything from movie rights to memorabilia to odd Martian minerals to new chemicals with industrial and medical applications.

Part of that appeal - eagerly trumpeted by the corporation in charge on Mars as well as the news media at large - are the lives of the two most famous Martian residents, Julia and Viktor, the "Mars Couple," members of the first expedition over 20 years ago who remained on Mars, almost every moment of their lives played out before everyone on Earth. People have grown up witnessing their triumphs, such as the discovery of complex anaerobic life on Mars (the interesting and enigmatic Marsmat, something dubbed by one of the characters as the "Stromatolite Empire"), their tragedies, such as the death of various team members, and even their simple good luck (many label their apparent good health and youthful appearance as a result of something dubbed the "Mars Effect," a concept the corporation was not above exploiting back on Earth).

Unable to survive back on Earth due to decades in the lighter gravity of Mars and unwilling to go to administrative posts on the Moon when pressured by their bosses, Viktor and Julia jump at the change to go on a brand new fusion spaceship, the _High Flyer_, the first of its kind, rocketing at high speed to the "far dark," the edge of the solar system, the planet Pluto. They are to join Captain Shanna Axelrod and the crew of the ship _Proserpina_, the first ship to reach Pluto, where they made an amazing discovery; not only is there life on Pluto, but there is an intelligent native species there, one they dub the Zand. Or is it native? The Plutonian life forms, biochemistry, and ecosystem are like nothing that has ever been seen and their discovery is just the tip of the iceberg as to how deeply alien the outer edge of the solar system truly is. Shanna, Viktor, Julia, and their crews are also ordered to study two potentially very troubling phenomena; why the heliopause - the turbulent zone where the solar wind meets the interstellar plasma beyond our solar system - continues to move closer and closer to the Sun, and why Pluto is heating up when models show that it should in fact be cooling down. Were these odd occurrences connected? Do they pose a threat to Earth?

I liked _The Sunborn_ a lot, it was a good book. I found the title appropriate, and like the novel itself, was full of layers of meaning, new layers being revealed, peeled back like the layers of an onion, revealed to the reader as the book progressed. The book had diagrams to illustrate a few key points, a rarity in fiction. The three main characters (Shanna, Viktor, and Julia) were well-developed and fairly complex individuals, though most of the rest of the crew of the two ships was less distinct. The aliens were quite alien, interesting, and well described, with chapters told from their point of view. There was a good amount of action, yet not to such an extent as to be extraneous, unbelievable, or irrelevant to the plot. Though I learned after reading the book that it was in fact a sequel to an earlier novel by Benford, _The Martian Race_, it did quite well as a stand-alone book (though I found his portrayal of Mars interesting enough that I may read the earlier volume at some point).

My complaints are very few. I thought that the humans were able to translate the alien's language a little too easily. Benford spent a fair amount of effort explaining how alien languages might be translated - no hand-waving here - but I thought that it would still take more time and effort to translate an alien language than he allowed for, though he does make a case as to why he thinks one can achieve a working dialogue in a few days (this is not a major point with me and a necessary aspect of the plot). As noted, I think the secondary characters could have been a lot more distinct, but again, this is a very minor point.

A very good book, it compares very favorably to other pre-interstellar spaceflight novels set in our solar system, such as the Charles Sheffield trilogy that began with _Cold As Ice_ and Ben Bova's epic "Grand Tour" series that includes such installments as _Venus_ and _Jupiter

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this unexceptional and somewhat slow-moving follow-up to The Martian Race (1999), Benford sends Julia and Viktor, the first astronauts to land on Mars, off to Pluto to investigate a number of strange phenomena. The solar system's coldest, most distant planet appears to be heating up and developing an atmosphere. Stranger still, another expedition has discovered life on Pluto, in an environment where it shouldn't exist. 

[Bonni · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sequel to The Martian Race, featuring our Martian astronauts Julia and Victor along with two actual new characters and a bunch of new redshirts.

It's 30 years later, the team has established horticulture on Mars and learned so much more about the Marsmat, and now they're off to a face new challenge -- exploring Pluto. With the impossibly cold temperatures of Pluto, most of the team's work is done from the spaceships by sensors, probes, and a brilliant AI that specializes in languages. But soon they learn that Pluto is not the final frontier, and there are beings still beyond...

I didn't enjoy this book as much as The Martian Race, in part because I didn't understand or couldn't grasp the science and math of it. When we imagine extraterrestrials, no matter how unusual their shapes or customs, we still picture them as biological, physical beings. It's harder than I expected to stretch my imagination beyond that.

[Nicatel · Rating 3 out of 5]

E' il seguito del romanzo "Obiettivo Marte" (pubblicato su Urania Jumbo pochi mesi fa) ma sembra quasi scritto da un'altra persona. Premessa: non c'era alcun bisogno di un seguito, perché il primo romanzo era ampiamente autoconclusivo. Detto ciò, se "Obiettivo Marte" (del 1999) racconta la conquista del Pianeta Rosso in un modo che potrebbe essere considerato quasi realistico, qui sembra di essere finiti in un romanzo di fantascienza scritto negli anni '50, non nel 2005. La vicenda diventa sempre più improbabile man mano che procede, e le spiegazioni scientifiche sono una debole scusa che copre l'inverosimiglianza della storia. I personaggi vengono presentati, poco sfruttati, abbandonati nel corso della storia, in una trama sfilacciata e talvolta ingenua. Se fosse davvero stato scritto negli anni '50 sarebbe anche un romanzo carino e dotato di sense of wonder, ma dopo il 2000 - e da Benford - ci si aspetta qualcosa di meglio.

[Rebecca Williamson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun science issues, but a little too thin on plot and characters for my tastes.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Benford, Gregory. The Sunborn. 2005. Adventures of Viktor and Julia No. 2. Aspect, 2007.
In The Sunborn, Viktor and Julia, the husband-and-wife team who first colonized Mars, leave the Red Planet to rescue Shana Axelrod, daughter of the billionaire who made their Martian expedition possible. Her first manned mission to Pluto has dropped out of communication. Since Viktor and Julia have discovered complex life on Mars, it is not much of a surprise to find that there is also life on Pluto. In fact, there are competing species there who don’t know what to make of the small, hot creatures who have intruded on them. So, it is a three-ring circus: Shana and her crew, Julia and Viktor and their crew, and creatures whose life is plasma-based. Part of the fun here is listening in on the several varieties of ETs as they try to make sense of their human visitors. Benford, for whom writing science fiction was a parallel career to his work as a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, is well qualified to speculate on the kinds of life that could exist in the outer solar system. I could not find anything in Benford’s description of Pluto that was not compatible with the images of it returned by the New Horizon spacecraft that was launched the year after the novel was published. The Sunborn is enjoyable hard science fiction. 4 stars.

[Moreno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oltre Plutone, seguito di Obiettivo Marte, è un romanzo di fantascienza, scritto da Gregory Benford.
La storia riprende le avventure di Julia e Viktor, i due astronauti di Obiettivo Marte, che sta volta si troveranno ad affrontare un viaggio nelle più gelide e remote regioni del sistema solare, per svelare un mistero che rivoluzionerà totalmente il concetto di esistenza del genere umano, sfondando i limiti di ciò che è inconcepibile.

Di per sé la trama l'ho trovata affascinante, ma spesso affrontata in modo da risultare di difficile comprensione per chi non ha una formazione scientifica. Molti sono i richiami alle leggi dell'elettromagnetismo e della meccanica orbitale, ma pure, d'altra parte, alla mitologia e alla concezione del divino.
Un grosso problema che ho trovato in questo libro è che, a parte i tre personaggi principali, molti non sono nemmeno personaggi, bensì delle figure che eseguono azioni, pronunciano frasi, ma non sono caratterizzate in alcun modo e questo ha comportato per me una grossa difficoltà ad immedesimarmi nella storia.
L'ho trovata tutto sommato una storia piuttosto intrigante, in cui il genere umano intravede il senso della vita, ritrovandosi ad avere a che fare con forze così potenti da non poter essere neanche capite del tutto; ma lo stile con cui questa storia è stata scritta non mi ha colpito completamente.

[Becky Beaman · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the near future, when corporations have taken the lead in voyaging into space, two separate teams are ordered to converge at Pluto, where some unknown force is raising the temperature on the icy outermost orb. The first time on-site finds a sentient race living in the frozen wastes of dayside Pluto, without the microorganisms one would expect with a complex race of beings. The other team is re-directed from their long-term mission on Mars to investigate the rise in Pluto's temperature. What they find is a race of intelligent Beings made of electromagnetic fields who have little regard for such tiny beings as humans, and doubt that humans can be intelligent. Deaths on both sides of the meeting precede any meaningful progress toward understanding. Good action, good characters -- highly recommended!

[Lyle Blosser · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy successor to The Martian Race. Neatly and with enjoyable imagination combines the discoveries being made on Mars and the new ones being made on Pluto and in the our solar system. Sometimes the characters came across as a little wooden, but still quite an enjoyable read. The conceptual leaps were wonderfully envisioned and carried the book grandly. A real sense of wonder infused the tale and let me feel like I was truly in the far reaches of our solar system, with vivid and poetic descriptions of the alien yet common threads of intelligence and communication.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, though not quite as much as its predecessor. I wasn’t into the characters or plot as much as I was those of The Martian Race, but I really enjoyed the lofty and wild approach to xenobiology throughout the book. I wish I was more motivated by the story, but it felt kind of like a backdrop to explore the really great ideas on alien life forms as opposed to feeling truly interwoven.

Still 4 stars because it wasn’t a bad story or difficult to read, and the larger ideas were really thought provoking and intriguing.

[Jinkies · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an awful followup of Viktor & Julia 1. Their characters were fine, the newly-introduced Shanna was a terrible caricature. The characters' internal struggles were made more prominent in this book, but they were also nonsensical.

The new aliens were quite interesting, and there was some neat exploration of their physics. That was fun. Listening in on their conversations, though, was not - it felt cheap and made them feel too human, whether they're AU-scale plasma beings or icy dragons.

[Charl · Rating 4 out of 5]

New discoveries on and beyond Pluto carry the tale from The Martian Race to the very edge of the Solar System. If you enjoyed Martian Race, you'll enjoy it.

If you haven't read The Martian Race, you should. Benford gives enough background info to get you through this, but it'll be much better if you've read TMR.

[Robert Knudsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally enjoyed

This was a great read, I think I enjoyed this book more than the first book. Both stories were great,I really enjoyed how well the characters were written, and the storyline was outstanding,well off to my next read 📚

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok read, but not as good as "The Martian Race".

[Chris Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good read for fans of near future SF...

Absorbing and packed full of science fact within the fiction. A good read but a little bogged down in some of the chapters.

[Jor · Rating 2 out of 5]

oh its trash lol 😂

[Bud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imaginative thinking about the basis of other forms of life.

[R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fabulous ideas regarding extraterrestrial intelligence are offset by depthless characters and a narrative that is at times boring.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Julia and Viktor, the first astronauts to land on Mars, are sent off to Pluto to investigate a number of strange phenomena. The solar system's coldest, most distant planet appears to be heating up and developing an atmosphere. Stranger still, another expedition has discovered life on Pluto, in an environment where it shouldn't exist. Benford has always been fascinated by the possibilities inherent in extraterrestrial life, and he takes advantage of his own scientific specialty, plasma physics, to create some extraordinary creatures. The competently constructed plot details the unraveling of a series of mysteries via the application of scientific method spiced with credible intuitive leaps. What fails to satisfy, however, are the characters. Julia seems too perfect, while her husband, Viktor, is little more than a nice guy with a funny accent. The second exploratory ship's captain, the daughter of the billionaire who financed Julia and Viktor's original Mars trip, comes across as a Paris Hilton with an advanced degree in biology. Her scenes with Julia, which involve stereotypical assumptions about how powerful women must interact, can be painful. Hard SF fans will find this an adequate read, but Benford has done far better work in the past. (Publishers' Weekly review)

The sad thing about this book is I don't even remember reading it. Most previously read books at least trigger some tinkling of a memory once I re-read a synopsis...this one? Not so much. I guess Publishers' Weekly got it right.

[Erica Anderson]

I absolutely loved the first several chapters of this book, which describe the continuing adventures of Viktor and Julia on Mars. Their exploration of the possibly sentient "Mars mat" was grounded in speculative biology that I found both believable and fascinating.

This section ends with Viktor and Julia being informed that they're to leave Mars to join a mission to Pluto. Switch to Pluto, and the discovery of a sentient species existing in a methane-based world. The captain of the Pluto mission is incredibly annoying--a fact that is recognized by her entire crew. I kept hoping they would space her, but no such luck.

And then it gets really weird, with the discovery of entities that exist in wave form. I don't have much background in physics, and maybe it would have helped if I had. I didn't understand the science and, while I could follow the plot, I didn't find these new entities at all believable.

SF authors face a massive challenge in writing non-human entities that are believable and truly alien. That's why we get so many humanoids with an extra mouth or two arms or whatever--recognizable, but different. Creating a truly alien alien that also engages readers is a tough undertaking. And the wave-based entities, with names like "Serene" and "Recorder," just didn't work for me.

So that's where I gave up. Despite the great beginning, the combination of a supremely annoying character and entities I just couldn't believe made The Sunborn a DNF for me.

[ConnieM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love sci-fi and this one gratified my fancy for space operas. Corny? Totally. Interesting concepts abound based on real, up-to-date discoveries from the world of astrophysics, Mars probe data, the Voyagers new and wild data (yes, folks, those little sweethearts we sent out of the solar system over 35 years ago are still ticking away, sending unbelievably valuable and unexpected information). I recommend this book if - and only if - you are interested in these kinds of things. If you want a book written like poetry and filled with all kinds of intertwining plots, allegories and dynamic character development, this is not the book for you. This is a space opera at its best. Love it for that.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the "hard science" in this book. Everything about this book is completely believable (and it get's pretty far out toward the end). I must say, though, that I think Benford is better when he is a collaborator (and he has collaborated with some of the best, such as A.C.Clarke). His plot seems a little plodding at times, and hence it took a bit of effort to get to the end of this one. Still, the concepts explored in this novel are pretty amazing and thought provoking, and the characters turned out to be compelling. I'm hoping for a sequel!

[Jamie Collins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although it was nice at first to catch up with Julia and Viktor, still on Mars 20 years later, I lost interest in this at the halfway point. I liked the first book, which was a small, realistic near-future story about a mission to Mars. This book makes a huge leap to vast interstellar plasmatic alien beings doing experiments on Pluto. The new new protagonist, Axelrod’s daughter, is a dreadful, unconvincing character and Gregory’s rather shallow writing isn’t up to this task.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't realize this was a sequel to 'The Martian Race' (which I haven't read) until a quarter of the way through.

The magnetic creatures are similar to what's near the black hole in one of the later Galactic Center novels. There isn't much explanation for how they could actually live and persist.

[Vincenzo Bacci · Rating 3 out of 5]

a good story about first contact and entirely new ways life could develop. It's a sequel to Martian Race, which I did not read, but I think it did not influence my understanding. Plenty of hard science and technology. Characters tend to be unidimensional. Good pacing, satisfactory conclusion with open-ended possibilities.

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Although parts of the plot move so quickly as to be disorienting and the characters are mostly rather flat, this book more than makes up for it with its sizzling ideas. Totally captivating!

[JC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this when I was still in high school so, I can't really remember the details. However, the idea that there are foreign creatures living outside Earth and they are like plasma really struck me. As far as I can remember, this is the only detail that really stuck.