Star Born

Star Born is a science fiction novel by the American writer Andre Norton, first published in 1957 as a sequel to The Stars Are Ours!, set three generations later.

That earlier book describes how a group of scientists and engineers converted an interplanetary ship for a voyage between the stars to escape an Earth ruled by an anti-intellectual dictatorship. The ship coasted for centuries with its passengers in suspended animation and came at last to a star with an Earth-like planet, Astra. The settlers made a home there and became friends with the planet's amphibious humanoids, the merpeople, whose cities had been built by a species the colonists call Those Others, which had enslaved them and then fought among itself.

In this book Dalgard Nordis sets out on his man-journey with his knife brother Sssuri to explore one of Those Others' ruined cities and extend the Colony's map of the world. Sssuri can speak telepathically with the local animals, and it is he who senses the danger first; some of it is waiting in the ruins, and some of it arrives across the sky.