he latest book from professional physicist and longtime speculative-fictioneer Benford is a sequel to his The Martian Race (1999). But the current volume stands alone with firm independence—as I can testify, based on my own personal inexperience with the prior tale.
That first book, we soon learn in backstory, chronicled the arrival of humans on Mars circa 2018, as the result of a $30 billion global contest. The winning team was backed by an entrepreneur named John Axelrod, head of the American-Asian Consortium. Axelrod appears briefly in the new book. But more of this stage is taken up by his daughter, Shanna.
In Part One of The Sunborn, we witness life on a thoroughly colonized Mars, home in 2045 to over 100 people. Chief among these are the husband-and-wife team of Julia and Viktor, who were among the first four explorers to touch down on the Red Planet. Some two decades later, they are the respected tribal elders. One of the big riddles they are still working on is the nature of the lone Martian life form, a kind of highly organized and evolved microbial mat known as the Marsmat. Lately the widespread underground organism has been making what seem to be communication attempts. Viktor almost loses his life when some equipment hooked up to the Marsmat experiences a huge power surge from the alien. But he recovers, and is intent on continuing his probes. However, Axelrod, in his role as funder of the colony, has other plans for Julia and Viktor. He's sending them to Pluto, where his daughter has discovered more sentient life.
Part Two focuses on Shanna Axelrod and her crew aboard the Proserpina in orbit around Pluto. Much to everyone's amazement, Pluto (now warming up slightly thanks to its eccentric orbit) hosts a flourishing ecology, including intelligent "living rocket" creatures named zands. Establishing a dialogue with the zands, Shanna learns of their natural enemies, the Darksiders. Investigating these belligerent creatures, Shanna discovers a race of robots, plainly artificial. Someone built the Darksiders and set them against the zands. But who?
Answers begin to arrive in Part Three, when the Proserpina and the High Flyer (the ship carrying Viktor and Julia) journey out beyond Pluto, following a backchannel from the Darksiders, to encounter the strange non-material intelligences that lurk there. Will a rapprochement with these Sunborn Beings be possible, or will the differences between mankind and space dwellers prove insurmountable? And how will the Marsmat figure into all this?
Questions as well as answers
You can always count on several things in a Benford novel. Scrupulous scientific rigor made limpidly transparent. Speculative steps beyond the best current information into uncharted but plausible territory. And the combination of these two factors to produce the classic SF sense of wonder.
Additionally, the prose will be well wrought and even poetic at times. The characters will be engaging positive types (there are very few actual villains in Benford's cosmos), with their share of human frailties. The exciting action will be alternated with more cerebral moments. And the whole effect will be one of vast vistas opening outward, with no end to the questing in sight.
The Sunborn hews to this winning template quite nicely, and will reward all of Benford's fans. He manages to make his colonization of Mars sound fresh even in light of the panoramic job already done by Kim Stanley Robinson. He details the exciting yet sensually limited environment of interplanetary flight aboard fusion rockets vividly. He creates not one, not two, but three alien ecologies in immense believable detail. And he limns the mechanics of three different first-contact scenarios as well. Toss in the larger issue of a celestial change in our solar system that just might wipe out all life on Earth, and you've got a jam-packed novel of ideas.
But without an entertaining, humanized cast, you'd be nowhere. Luckily, Benford does a fine job here as well, setting up various interpersonal dynamics among the Axelrods and Julia and Viktor, as well as among the lesser players. He's always concerned with the microcosmic as well as the macrocosmic.
And one telltale pointer toward this concern is Benford's focus on mortality. There's a human death in the very first chapter, and others along the way. The initial run-ins between humans and aliens bring deaths as well, however accidental. Benford realizes that the universe is a dangerous place, with personal extinguishment coming to us all, even the seemingly immortal Sunborn Beings. His response to this harsh fact of existence is to affirm even more strongly the pleasures and challenges of living, in the same manner Poul Anderson consistently did. Benford is not often put forward as a philosophical writer per se, but that's the secret engine that drives all his star-faring and intellectual gamesmanship.
