Sunborn

Sunborn is the fourth novel in Jeffrey A. Carver's Chaos Chronicles, the long SF sequence that follows John Bandicut from his initial accidental first-contact through a series of escalating cosmic-scale encounters. The book takes his expanded crew (the alien Charlie, the AI companion, the various human and posthuman characters who have joined across the series) toward the heart of a stellar-scale civilization.

Carver's strength has always been the careful integration of the actual physics with the larger SF imagination. The deep-space sequences in Sunborn are rendered with the kind of careful astrophysical attention that the form does not require, and the alien intelligences are written as genuinely alien rather than as analogues for human factions.

Four stars. Recommended to readers of hard-SF space opera. The series has been building toward genuine payoff and Sunborn is one of the strongest installments. Read the earlier Chaos Chronicles first.