Customer Reviews

Sunborn

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a sequel of sorts to Benford's "The Martian Race" (which was great). Unlike many sequels, however, it is irrelevant whether you've read the preceding novel or not. It uses two of the main characters from the "Martian Race" and obviously takes place in the same universe but that's about it.

It is an interesting twist on the "first contact" theme with not one but three new alien species discovered and communicated with. There is a tie-in to the "The Martian Race" at the very end that is not much of a suprise, having been pretty well telegraphed by the middle of the short novel.

Benford is a great SF writer, as well as a talented physicist and author. He is and has been one of the best authors of hard SF since the publication of "Timescape" some 23 years ago. But this one is a little disappointing. The human (and alien) characters are not well developed and are mostly flat and irrelevant placeholders to this plot-based novel. There is no real suspense and the hard SF is minimal. Of course, none of this will stop me from rushing out and getting the next Benford novel as soon as it's published, since he is one of my favorite SF authors, interesting and tremendously talented. Everyone can have an off-day. This was one of his.

The Sunborn (2005) is the second SF novel in the Martian Race series. In the previous novel, Julia and Marc find life in the vented caverns under Gusev crater. The Marsmat is a symbiotic collection of single-celled organisms closely related to archaebacteria. When the ERV tests failed for the second and final time, Julia and Viktor volunteered to remain behind while Marc and Raoul returned in the Airbus nuclear vehicle.

In this novel, Shanna Axelrod is the daughter of John Axelrod, The Man Who Sold Mars and the organizer of the Consortium. Born to Axelrod's second wife, she had conflicts with the two later wives and finally moved back in with her mother.

Shanna had a long standing admiration for Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered the planet Pluto. When the ISA announced their intentions to send a ship to investigate strange changes in the Pluto/Charon system, Shanna was determined to become one of the crew members.

She was already a working astronaut in the commercial fleet with biologist/medic training. Although she was well qualified, so were other candidates. She called on her father for aid and he named her as the Consortium selection for the Proserphina crew. When the Captain of the Proserphina was later killed in an accident, Shanna became his replacement.

Julia and Viktor are being continually pressured by the quirks of the Consortium. A new manager is sent from the Moon to coordinate the Martian science effort. She is very abrasive and both Julia and Viktor try to avoid her. They sneak out on an excursion to Vent R, a newly discovered pressure relief vent from the Marsmat caverns beneath the surface.

Shanna discovers intelligent life on Pluto and rides the lander down to establish contact with the creatures. During a long conversation with the Old One, she learns that the zand are being killed off by the Darksiders. After a second landing, she discovers that the Darksiders are machines sent by some things beyond Pluto.

Shanna uses a jury-rigged weapon to repel an assault by the machines, but they still damage the lander and it crashes. The Darksiders force their way aboard the ship, but soon withdraw after repairing the damaged hull. Shanna almost freezes to death.

Axelrod sends a new fusion drive vessel to Mars and arranges for Julia and Viktor to take it to Pluto. Even before they arrive, Shanna has strong aversions to their presence. She is particularly envious of Julia, a fellow biologist with a well established reputation.

This novel incorporates some speculations concerning life within and between the stars. It even ties in the Marsmat with the huge Beings dwelling beyond Pluto. However, conflict results from the mutual ignorance of various lifeforms.

Highly recommended for Benford fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of space exploration, scientific inquiries and strange Beings within the Oort Cloud.

-Arthur W. Jordin

Benford continues his earlier book, "The Martian Race", with this novel. If you liked the characters and logic in that book, you will probably be attracted to this. Rather didactic in parts, with schematics of, say, the heliopause at the outer solar system. These diagrams would not be out of place in a science text. Benford actively tries to educate his readers. At times this leads to dry passages in the text.

Did you know that Benford's research area is plasma physics? He parlays that expertise into envisioning vast alien intelligences that are basically sparse plasmas. A very evocative image. Along these lines, he makes a valiant effort to portray truly alien minds interacting with each other, and with humans. The effort is commendable. His aliens are not humans dressed up in funny skins, acting as aliens, which is what a lot of science fiction depictions end up as.

But I am not sure that he truly succeeds. While yes, the aliens do come across as different, I found the resultant read to be rather dull and sterile.

Two decades have passed since married astronaut scientists Julia and Viktor landed on Mars and discovered we are not alone when they found the living huge Marsmat (see THE MARTIAN RACE). Over the subsequent years, they learned a lot about the strange, anaerobic natives to include their seemingly weird abilities involving magnetism.

However, a new exploration opportunity has surfaced with a chance to go to Pluto, which has suddenly for no reason has begun heating up though still way below zero Fahrenheit and data shows the forming of an atmosphere. Julia and Viktor leap at the prospects to be part of the expedition exploring the coldest known planet in the solar system. Shockingly, a previous expedition led by Captain Shanna has found life, the humongous intelligent zand, on the frozen orb that can communicate with humans. The zand warn that the dangerous mechanical Darksiders are coming on "iceteroids," from the Oort cloud.

This sequel contains a wonderful story line on the vast possibilities of alternate life forms in the solar system. However, the human members of the cast seem shallow. Julia and Viktor have not seemed to have aged in spite of the harshness of their work although twenty years have passed and can do no wrong. Shanna at times is a genius and at other moments a jealous chick lit bimbo instead of a courageous brilliant explorer (the next generation Julia). Other characters are one dimensional unless they happen to be a Marsmat, a zand, or the Darksiders. The scientific discussion that underlies the novel is superb and highlights Gregory Benford's ability to simplify without dumbing down extremely complex theories and do it inside a strong story line that overcomes the prime players.

Harriet Klausner

I have really tried with Benford - COSM, JUPITER PROJECT, the misnamed MARTIAN RACE. But this is it. I judge a story by its characters, plot and writing and SUNBORN flunks all three. As usual, everyone is two-dimensional - aliens and humans - more caricature than character. Their speech sounds like something from a scifi book - "We are the OGOGO from the planet NCHYDHH and we come in peace, blah blah" The Russian still does not use indefinite articles after 20 years and comes off sounding like a cave man. Benford is at his best when describing modern scientific theory but when he turns to intimacy - family chats, friendship, romantic sweet talk - dialogue becomes clumsy and amateurish.

The plot? We mmet the Adam & Eve of the Red Planet, a pair of astronauts who have become media stars for a mega corporation. The author's knowledge of economics seems limited to supposed back room chatter and the evils of BIG business. A company rep arrives and suddenly the two are sent to...Pluto(!) and meet none other than the daughter of the CEO(!!) who has discovered alien life forms(!!!). How many ways can you say "cliche"?

Here it breaks down completely. Benford may be a whiz in the hard sciences but when it comes to notions of consciousness and intelligence it's a disaster. The aliens hail from the Oort Region beyond the Solar System and here's the rub: Their speech (presented in < >) is anthropomorphic reflecting human needs, desires and psychology yet they do not possess the neurological basis or evolution for such attitudes. No creature in the galaxy can approximate the human condition without sensory input like humans. Anyway, a lot of nothing goes on and the ships return to Mars for more meandering and musings.

Perhaps it is Benford's zeal for scientific accuracy that has prevented him from being a visionary writer. His stories are rooted firmly in the here and now but sometimes authors need to spread their wings and soar on flights of imagination.

Ah, I am a virgin to true science fiction, one of stories written of outer space and its realms. And I was not disappointed. This is partly due to the fact that Benford is a professor of physics himself, so he is well versed in his field and the logic behind other fields.

The Zand are an altogether great fictional alien race, one that captivated me from the beginning. The Darksiders not so much, and the Beings had to warm me up before I accepted and believed in them. All in all it is a believable future, a believable notion of the sciences involved in interplanetary exploration and discovery.

The book itself focuses more on plot than it does character development, as the characters are rather one sided. As well at times the plot moved forward too easy. The Beings would say or do something, and the next chapter was the cosmonauts, within the first few paragraphs, talking about exactly that. Or at times the alien races are not alien enough. The cosmonauts looked upon the Beings as dragons when they first encountered them, and then the Beings called the spaceships dragons. Huh? Why use the same notion twice, especially when it is an alien race using it?

I expect there is some kind of sequel in the works. Why else would Benford have Instigator, in the last few pages, mention an altogether different Being named Venturer, who there was no mention of at all, that went inbound and was lost just the same as Incursor? I suspect the insinuation is that Venturer is the Being behind Earth's life, just as... Well I won't spoil the story for anyone.

Minor inconsistencies, though. All in all, the book was enjoyable and I was involved with it, felt like continuing to read the book from beginning to end. Benford does a great job in marrying science to fiction. Although character development is lacking, the science goes well with the story, which compensates. I would recommend this book to anyone. In fact, time to try another of Benford's books!

3.5 Stars.

_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_.

My overall impression is that this book is really three treatments for three different books, or perhaps three short stories extended and patched together. While these three plots might have meshed together nicely in some other writer's hands, they did not in this case. Instead we get a grinding of gears and, ultimately, a transmission failure no specialist could fix.

Rarely will I abandon a book 75 pages before it is finished, but this one I did. I didn't even sneak a peek to see how it ended.

At mars, nothing could live in the outside, in lethal ultraviolet. Marsmat, an anaerobic native, was an exception. In a murky vault a dim gray luminosity, generates by enzymes, radiated on the rock walls where mat species covered. The expedition group froze. The mat began to make a human outline. Then sparks at the ground contact where they have put the electrodes. The capacitors exploded. Elsewhere spacecraft Proserpina was approaching the edge of our solar system. An excitement broke out in the Pluto mission control auditorium while young astronaut Shanna Axelrod's, the captain's, first words fill the room: "Life! I'm sure of it!". The auditorium stirred. How can there be life when sunlight was 900 times weaker there and temperatures were near absolute zero? Mars, Pluto: what was going on?

From the previous book we meet Julia Barth and her husband Victor that have been studying Mars all their life. Due to Mars' weaker gravity, the years have made it impossible to go back to Earth. New explorers are building up with them a fledgling colony. Their benefactor John Axelrod, head of multi-billionaire enterprise, is planning to make Mars a self-sustaining enterprise. Everything on there should be made capitalizable. But he has also other ventures. Her daughter Shanna leads an expedition at Pluto that just turned gold. Life. The Zand and the dangerous mechanical Darksiders that are coming from the Oort cloud. Why the Darksiders destroy Zand while they are frozen, is a mystery. Another puzzle to solve is that solar system's bow shock behind the Pluto is moving. If the solar wind let forces behind the shock intrude into the solar system, Earth could be destroyed. Axelrod manages to convince Julia and Victor take the opportunity, as Mars starts to be too commercial to their taste, to explore what's wrong with the bow shock. As the story progresses, we find that something lies out there. Something very, very ancient.

Two (2) stars. Written in 2005, this ends duology started in The Martian Race 1999. As the years suggest, both books can be read stand alone. The only link between them is the Mars expedition's lead figures. This is hard science fiction made accessible to the reader with accompanying pictures. The book has definitive sections that combine all the episodes together: Mars, Pluto, Bow Shock, merging of the Pluto and Mars expeditions, last the new unknown. The use of this structure is efficient and keeps building up the tension towards the end. Only if the characters were at level of the story. The big-champ Axelrod is quite distant spider on the web and the decision to portrait his daughter Shanna to depict teenager moods at faced situations, destroys the cohesion of the book. A NASA astronaut and a moody adolescent minded stereotype won't mix at reader. In addition when Shanna and older Julia meet, they are put into a cat-fight positions where the younger feels urge to rival his legend in all occasions. Overall the story flows well forward like a cozy train and the electromagnetic aliens are rooted in science. By 2020 of book's time it may be a little stretch to believe that all encompassing AI-translator named "wise guy" is able to do miracle translations from alien-to-earth and vice versa. The aliens, called Beings, are also a little too humanized. E.g. the childish actions of one "disintegrated" group doesn't quite seem to match their million years intelligence. A decent inner-solar-system story

I got both "The Martian Race" and "The Sunborn" on the same day, purchased from an Amazon 3rd-party seller, so I read them back-to-back. I enjoyed the former very much, and have liked most of the other Benford novels that I've read, so I had high expectations for "The Sunborn" since it takes up the story of Julia and Viktor some 20 years after the first book ended. Boy, what a let down.

There were some good points: Benford's descriptions of Pluto's landscape and diurnal rhythms were excellent. But like another reviewer, I gave up on this story with less than 100 pages to go, so I can't say how it ends. The point is, I didn't care how it ends. I had zero sympathy for any of the cardboard cutouts walking around on Pluto (or Mars, for that matter), especially the protagonist, Shanna Axelrod. The plot and dialog were silly to the point of laughing out loud.

I wish that I hadn't read this book. It was not only bad in its own right, it also diminished the pleasure I'd gotten out of reading "The Martian Race."