To the edge of the solar system

The Sunborn

A Novel

Gregory Benford

Warner Books: 330 pp., $24.95

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Gregory Benford’s new novel, “The Sunborn,” is a sequel to “The Martian Race,” in which a private consortium led by biochemical magnate John Axelrod won a $30-billion prize by outstripping sluggish, bureaucratic NASA in a contest to colonize the Red Planet. Two decades have passed. Axelrod’s astronauts, Julia and Viktor Barth, have become the First Couple in a thriving settlement on Mars. They have discovered a form of life, the Marsmat -- carpet-like molds that dwell underground and send messages by electric current. Despite their fame, Julia and Viktor hear unwelcome whispers. Are they getting old?

No. It turns out that Axelrod wants to unsettle them enough to make them willing to rescue his daughter, Shanna, who already has flown to Pluto to investigate a strange warming trend that intermittently melts its methane seas. Shanna and her crew also find life -- intelligent creatures called the “zand,” who worship the sun and have an epic oral history. She also finds evidence that Pluto may be a giant petri dish for a science experiment run by even greater intelligences in the outer reaches of space and they don’t want humans to butt in.

“Beings” composed of widely dispersed particles and magnetic fields, as huge as planets but too gauzy to be seen by human eyes, attack Shanna’s ship and kill a crew member on the vessel that the Barths pilot to the rescue. They in turn kill one of the Beings -- drilling it with both ships’ fiery exhaust.

War looms, just as a new picture of the universe is coming into focus, challenging Earth’s traditional religions, expanding the theory of evolution and linking the Beings with the plasma expelled by solar storms -- hence “The Sunborn” -- and even with those enigmatic molds on Mars. In the “long-dead twencen ... all the smart folk thought the universe was a pointless cosmic joke -- on us,” Julia muses. Now it seems more likely that the universe is “a meaningful entity,” designed to “generate life and then minds” everywhere.

Shanna is offended by her father’s insistence that space exploration always turns a profit. (He plans to exhibit zand in a zoo on the moon.) Julia and Viktor are offended by Shanna, who is bright but impetuous and covets the older astronauts’ prestige. All three resent interference from bean-counting Earthside middle management, psychologists, environmentalists and other naysayers.

Benford sides with the explorers. Shanna observes that “most spacers were from North America and Asia. Those were the cultures, mid-21st-century, where young people still asked, When can I do X? The Europeans usually said, with dread, How do we stop people from doing X? And X could be just about anything technological.”

A physicist, Benford crams his novels with hard science. In “The Sunborn” he does this about as painlessly as one can imagine. It’s fast-paced, vivid, often witty. The humans are inevitably more interesting than the zand (and the robot-like Darksiders who prey on them), and the zand, in their yearning for light and warmth and the meaning of things, are more interesting than the Beings. Viktor with his comic Russian accent, Julia and Shanna sparring like mother and daughter, Axelrod “steaming with energy” but far, far from the action -- they keep us reading on, and learning.

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Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.