Star Born

Star Born is a science fiction novel by American writer Andre Norton, first published in 1957 by World Publishing Company of Cleveland.[2] As the sequel to The Stars Are Ours!, Star Born continues its predecessor's adventure three generations later.

In The Stars Are Ours!, a group of scientists and engineers converts an interplanetary spaceship for an interstellar journey to escape from a vicious anti-intellectual dictatorship. Traveling at sub-light speed, with its crew and passengers in suspended animation, the ship coasts for centuries, finally reaching a star with an Earth-like planet, Astra, on which the ship lands. On that alien world the humans befriend sentient humanoids, the amphibious merpeople. The new colonists also discover the ruins of cities once occupied by "Those Others," a malevolently intelligent species that once enslaved the merpeople, but warred upon each other.

Dalgard Nordis, with his knife brother the merperson Sssuri, has gone on his man-journey. Three generations after his people came to Astra he has set out to explore the ruins of a city that once belonged to Those Others, thereby extending the Colony's map of this world and in the process demonstrating his suitability to sit on the Council of Free Men. In telepathic contact with the local fauna, Sssuri senses danger; the sight of a flaming object crossing the sky from east to west, toward where Those Others are rumored to live, underscores that judgement.

Roughly five centuries after a group of renegade scientists took a desperate plunge into interstellar space and two centuries after Pax collapsed and Humanity rediscovered the value of science, the starship RS 10 lands on Astra. Driven by rumors of that ancient expedition and enabled by the discovery of hyperdrive, the Federation of Free Men has sent nine ships into hyperspace; none has returned. On this tenth attempt at interstellar flight Raf Kurbi has the task of assembling and flying the flitter that will be used to explore the part of Astra around RS 10's landing point. One goal is what appears on the landing photos to be a city...