The novel “The Sunborn” by Gregory Benford was published for the first time in 2005. It’s the sequel to “The Martian Race“.

More than twenty years have passed since Viktor and Julia managed to reach Mars and there’s now a scientific research center on the red planet that is home to several people. The Consortium’s plans include a further expansion that brings profits but in the meantime another space mission is exploring Pluto led by Shanna Axelrod.

Meeting general disbelief, after studying the processes taking place on Pluto’s surface, Shanna Axelrod announced the existence of life forms adapted to that really freezing environment. Her father manages to convince Viktor and Julia to leave for Pluto to assist her mission and try to understand how life forms can exist so far from the Sun and what forces are at work.

“The Sunborn” is considered the second book of the adventures of Viktor and Julia because the couple is present and participates in the mission on Pluto but Shanna Axelrod is the real protagonist of this novel. For this reason and because more than two decades have passed since the events of “The Martian Race”, reading the first novel is useful to get to know some characters and the beginning of that space race but it’s not essential.

The initial part of “The Sunborn” is useful mainly to create the connection with “The Martian Race” by telling the situation on Mars and in particular Viktor and Julia’s. Billionaire John Axelrod kept on manipulating anyone and anything possible to carry out his agenda, which means bringing profits to the Consortium, but also helping out his daughter Shanna. After discovering really surprising life forms on Pluto, he also manages to manipulate Viktor and Julia by convincing them to leave for the dwarf planet.

Gregory Benford is a hard science fiction writer and in “The Martian Race” the plot was sometimes an excuse to develop a series of technical-scientific elements. This is also true in “The Sunborn”, but the plot development is very different because it’s more focused on the progressive discovery of truly exotic life forms in places where nobody would expect to find a biosphere. The study of those life forms is much more difficult than on Mars due to environmental conditions that make the Martian ones seem very favorable to human presence. For this reason, from this point of view, this novel seemed to me far more intriguing than the first one.

To develop his speculations, in “The Martian Race” Gregory Benford exploited many scientific studies about Mars that were already abundant because space probes had already been sent into the orbit of the red planet and various vehicles had already landed on its surface. In Pluto’s case, the author had to resort much more to hypotheses based on observations made from Earth that had provided much more limited knowledge. Despite this, the speculations developed in “The Sunborn” don’t seem absurd to me thinking of the knowledge gathered thanks to the Pluto flyby performed by NASA’s New Horizons space probe in 2015.

Spoilers about the nature of the aliens! The element I didn’t like is the aliens’ characterization. These are creatures that developed, or were created, in environments totally different from the Earth’s, and have physical characteristics and life cycles very different from those of human beings. Despite all this, they have very human behaviors, a choice I presume Gregory Benford made to help readers understand them but that doesn’t seem believable to me.

Overall, “The Sunborn” is a novel that gave me mixed feelings because of of its merits and flaws. If you’re interested in stories of scientific speculation with truly exotic alien life forms, you might like it.