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Gregory Benford
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 Gregory Benford is an astrophysicist who also writes fiction. To science fiction readers, he's a
hard science fiction writer who is also an astronomer. The tension between the daily work of science and the
avocation of writing in Benford's life has led him to write some of the finest hard sf of recent decades.
Brian W. Aldiss says: "If he takes the close and narrow view of his characters-an all-to-human view, of illness,
work and marital problems- his vision of the universe in which such frail beings exist is one of vast
perspectives, rather in the tradition of Stapledon and Clarke." And critic Larry McCaffery says: "Benford's work can
probably best be understood as a particularly successful example of the `modernist' branch of contemporary SF.
Indeed, what may initially strike reader about his meticulously crafted, psychologically convincing,
and verbally graceful fiction is the skillful manner in which he has appropriated a number of the key
modernist experimental devices and applied them to a succession of familiar sf motifs and plot structures."
In Benford's view, "People build their lives around work, yet how often does the subject appear in
fiction as a direct sensation, a lived experience?" Central to Benford's fiction are the characters of scientists at work.
The interaction between the scientist's work and daily life is the subject of his most famous novel,
Timescape (1980), as well as an integral part of most of his novels and stories. In an afterword to "Exposures" in his
short story collection, In Alien Flesh (1986), Benford discusses his ideas on sf writing: "a science fiction writer
is-or should be-constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts . . . To me
it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good
writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real. . . . For me, the only true guide is an
eye for the graininess of the world, rather then the convenient, ordained maps. . . . a will toward concreteness itself
brings into being the form and style appropriate to a story."
One of the really crucial things about Benford's work as a model of hard science fiction is not just
that he uses well-rounded characters as vehicles of the sense of wonder, but that he is characterizing scientists in
a context in which the relationship between their work and their emotional lives can be explored more fully
than in literatures that won't tolerate the scientific content. "I thought," says Benford, "to reflect what the process
of trawling for ideas, for insights, is like. Not necessarily the eureka! moment, more like the quiet oh yeah,
right sensation of provisional, momentary discovery. And how it reverberates through a life." "Exposures" is
a more personal, intimate view of astronomers than Latham's "The Xi Effect," and light years from Raymond
F. Jones' "The Person from Porlock" in its portrayal of a scientist at work. Benford is the first among the
hard science fiction writers to have mastered and integrated Modernist techniques of characterization and use
of metaphor.
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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.