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Gregory Benford
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 Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist specializing in plasma physics, grew up a science fiction fan
and began to write fiction as a hobby in 1965. Some of his early work was written in collaboration with
Gordon Eklund (their story, "If the Stars Are Gods," won a Nebula Award in 1975; it was expanded in 1977 into
a novel of the same title). In the mid-1970s he began to write his own fiction more consistently and revised
his first novel, Deeper Than the Darkness (1970) as
The Stars in Shroud (1976). His next novel,
In the Ocean of Night (1977), is generally regarded as his first mature work, followed by
Timescape (1980), his most famous novel and widely regarded as the best hard science fiction novel of recent decades, a milestone in using
more rounded characterization and social detail than was previously attempted in hard sf. Brian Aldiss (in
Trillion Year Spree) comments on Benford's early work, "The interest in anthropological roots, in language and
its limitations, and in the curious division of the human brain between thought and feeling, characterizes
not merely Benford's work but much of the SF of the seventies."
Since the 1970s, Benford had been a staunch and articulate defender of hard science fiction, both as
a public personality in the sf field and in essays and articles, speaking with the force of experience as a working
scientist and as perhaps the most respected hard sf writer of his generation. He is now regarded as the
central figure of the generation after Larry Niven in hard science fiction.
Often linked particularly with the tradition of Stapledon and Arthur C. Clarke, Benford after 1980
began to incorporate more of the technical influences of wider reading in Modernist American fiction into his work.
A Southerner himself, Benford found the stories of William Faulkner a particularly rich repository, and
mined "The Bear" for the novel Against
Infinity (1983), and As I Lay Dying for the story "To the Storming
Gulf" (1985). Faulkner had a real command of the history of the south and its psychological implications. If much
of sf is a mythic retelling of American history, what makes Benford's borrowing from Faulkner
particularly valuable to sf is that he is borrowing a subtle synthesis of the history of the south along with it.
American history has a good deal to do with what hard sf is about, and the history of the South is a neglected area
which nonetheless has many psychological resonances. Benford set out to exploit them in the 80s, then continuing
on to develop his Clarkeian future history (begun in
In the Ocean of Night) in Across the Sea of
Suns (1984), Great Sky River (1987), and
Tides of Light (1989). His body of work in the 1980s is the most
stylistically advanced, varied and sophisticated hard science fiction, the first to have successfully integrated many
conventional stylistic features of contemporary literary fiction, especially a more psychologically rounded
characterization, into hard science fiction.
"Relativistic Effects" shows that Benford can manipulate the tropes and conventions of genre sf and
at the same time make the people of the distant future seem human and sympathetic, regardless of their bizarre
circumstances. Here is the classic enclosed world of the spaceship travelling faster than the speed of light;
the physics of the situation makes the life of these people different in quite specific ways that are
metaphorically suggestive but grounded in a serious attempt to portray a rigorous, literal situation in conformance with
what relativity predicts. It is interesting to compare this story to Poul Anderson's novel,
Tau Zero (1970), and to Edward Bryant's "Particle Theory," other stories that investigate some of the rich metaphorical possibilities
of certain elements of physics.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.