Gregory Benford [An Interactive Introduction to David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer's The Acsent of Wonder]

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Introductory Essay

  • "Real Science, Imaginary Worlds" by Gregory Benford

    • Notes on Stories by Gregory Benford

  • "Exposures"

  • "Relativistic Effects"

    •

    cover of JUPITER PROJECT Gregory Benford [photo of Gregory Benford]

    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 beween 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 persepctives, 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 `moderinist' 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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    cover of JUPITER PROJECT Gregory Benford [photo of Gregory Benford]

    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.


    [Other Mentions of Gregory Benford]

    Notes on Stories by Gregory Benford

    Mentions