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. ( )

A classic hard SF novel. The initial setting is on Mars with the plot getting much more interesting once the setting moved to Pluto. The Zand, Darksiders and the Beings were all fascinating creations. Left wondering why the amount of the novel spent on Mars and the Marsmat when the attempt to tie them together at the end was such a wimper? ( )

A sequel to [The Martian Race] (see #121 above), in which two of the original researchers continue their work on Mars until called to go to Pluto, where lifeforms have been found. But this discovery, as much as it strains our understanding of life, is only the beginning, as the explorers join forces to go farther out, past the Bow Shock (where the solar winds of the heliosphere push against interstellar pressures), from where there seem to be messages being sent to the beings on Pluto. Again, fascinating theorizing on the forms life could take and the forces which would bring them about and support them. ( )

Benford's sequel to The Martian Race switches from the near space, high reality of that book to the edges of the Solar System (Pluto and beyond) and engages in far more speculative exploration of alternative forms of life. Eventually the two books are tied together by more than shared characters. In the afterword, Benford implies a closer connection in the writing than appears on the surface. Independently, each book is good hard SF, but as a pair they contradict each other thematically. The Martian Race took the harsh environment of Mars and developed a possible way for very low level life to exist. The Sunborn goes to the far harsher environment of Pluto and almost immediately presents not just life, but large intelligent life. How this can be where it's too cold for biochemical reactions and how it could have evolved is primarily what the novel is about. Good stuff, but the opposite of the realism of the first book.

The physical sciences are the strongest element of the book. The characterizations are weaker than The Martian Race, though not the worst hard SF has offered. The weakest elements have to do with the non-human intelligences. The aliens, so vastly different in size and origin than us, somehow sound just like us when they converse with each other. And then there's this artificial intelligence that is even more unconvincing -- Wiseguy, the machine translation system that not only can carry on human-level conversation with the human explorers, but can somehow, in the space of a few hours of conversation, with minimal common referents, learn to speak to the aliens too. Benford at one point tosses in a dig at 20th century AI researchers -- bias alert, I are one -- for trying to build AIs with symbolic reasoning. Progress he asserts only happened when starting over with robots. That's a perfectly valid idea with proponents. But Wiseguy is exactly not a robot, but a disembodied symbolic system.

Fine for lovers of hard SF. Skip if you're not into that sort of thing, ( )

I really enjoyed this book, full of interesting and thought-provoking ideas. Does alien intelligence have to be a physical being, or can it be something else? ( )