The novel “If the Stars Are Gods” by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund was published for the first time in 1977. It’s a fix-up of stories published in previous years.

Bradley Reynolds already has experience with space missions that have scientific purposes including the search for alien life forms in the solar system. The arrival from outer space of an alien spacecraft forces him to a different mission because he has to understand the way of thinking of beings who think that the stars are gods and speak to them.

After that experience, Bradley Reynolds retires to private life but after many years is called when an alien message is picked up. The search for the meaning of that message brings him to a space station in orbit around Jupiter in a situation made complex also by what happens on Earth.

In 1974 Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund wrote the novelette “If the Stars Are Gods”, which won the Nebula Award. It was the story of a first contact with sentient aliens traveling through space in search of a special star because they believe that stars are gods and communicate with them.

In subsequent years, the two authors wrote other stories with Bradley Reynolds as their protagonist. The first story is a kind of prologue set on Mars, where Reynolds finds microorganisms. The other stories are set decades after the original novelette forming another story of a search for alien life following the detection of a message from deep space.

The result is that the novel “If the Stars Are Gods” is actually the story of a lifetime of research by Bradley Reynolds. The encounter with the aliens in the original novelette has a profound effect on him, so much that for decades he retires to private life in a monastery. An alien message brings him back into space on a mission that at the same time expands the boundaries of humanity and forces human beings to question themselves.

Eventually the various stories that form the novel can be divided into a sort of prologue, which honestly serves little more than to write a bit of Bradley Reynolds’s background story, in the original story and the mission that began decades later. In essence, there are two really important stories and the second one is by far the longest.

In both stories, Bradley Reynolds has to deal with sentient aliens, in the first case face to face and in the second directing the mission that aims to decipher the alien message. The authors created aliens who in various ways are incomprehensible to humans and for this reason the novel is in some ways philosophical.

When they encounter aliens who believe that the stars are gods, humans think that it’s a faith similar to primitive human religions. Bradley Reynolds tries to understand these aliens’ way of thinking but believes that they don’t always answer his questions truthfully. That meeting has profound consequences on the protagonist.

The longest story concerns the mission in deep space. The alien message is of the type of the so-called Arecibo message sent into space a few years before Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund wrote their story. This research is intertwined with that of the changes that take place on Earth in a future in which there are persons created through genetic engineering.

A return of religious fervor leads to establish that they are not people, with a series of consequences. Mara and Corey, two members of the scientific staff of the space station, are among the persons discriminated against by the new law. I think this part of the story, which is also important because in some ways even Mara and Corey are aliens, deserved even more space.

In fact I think the main problem of the novel is that it’s too short to fully develop different stories that span decades. Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund introduced various very intriguing ideas about the search for alien life and the confrontation between humans and aliens that deserved greater development.

Sometimes readers complain of novels that are too long in which ideas are “drowned” in many useless or at least unnecessary parts, sometimes even creating series of novels. This novel is an opposite example. Instead of adding stories to the original novelette, Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund could’ve rewritten the original novelette to obtain a novel and a second novel to tell the next Bradley Reynolds’ mission.

Despite its limits, “If the Stars Are Gods” seemed to me an interesting novel for the themes addressed and its food for thought. If you like this kind of stories I think it’s worth reading.