The Sunborn

The Sunborn is a science fiction novel by the American writer Gregory Benford, published in 2005. It continues the story of characters he had introduced in an earlier novel about a Mars expedition and takes them out to the edge of the solar system.

Julia and Victor are the astronauts whose Mars mission made them famous, and by the time this book opens they are experienced, well known and used to being given orders. The Consortium sends them to Pluto to join a second starship commanded by Shanna Axelrod, a scientist as capable as she is difficult to work with.

Axelrod has found living creatures in the frozen ammonia and methane of the Plutonian sea, organisms that survive at temperatures three hundred degrees below zero. What starts as an extraordinary discovery becomes harder to describe as the evidence accumulates, and the two crews have to cooperate while their commanders compete. The novel is about exploring the most remote reaches of the solar system and about judgements made before the evidence is complete.