Gregory Benford

Introduction

Introduction Gregory Benford’s life has been active, varied, and highly significant—a life that has generated much fiction. Born in 1941 in Mobile, Alabama, he has strong roots in the American South. But as member of a military family, he spent much of his adolescence in such far-flung places as Germany and Japan. Of this was born a cosmopolitan perspective, which gave rise to a lifelong fascination with “alien” cultures. Benford chose a career in science. He and his exact twin brother Jim—with whom he has remained close throughout his life—earned doctorates in physics at the University of California, San Diego. This was a new campus and an amazing creative environment for the study of science in the 1960s. Study there was to mark Benford’s subsequent career as scientist. He received his PhD in 1967 and spent the next four years at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In 1971, he joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Irvine, where he remained until his “retirement ” in 2005. His career as a physicist has been a distinguished one. Benford directed a laboratory and published well over one hundred scientific papers in the fields of particle and plasma physics, and later in mathematical physics . Benford left UC Irvine to become co-founder and CEO of Genescient Inc., a biotech firm specializing in “twenty-first-century biology” and issues 2 IntroduCtIon of cellular longevity, based on the experiments of evolutionary biologist Michael Rose with Methuselah flies. Benford has had a longstanding interest in longevity technologies such as cryonics. He dealt with the cryonics question in a mystery novel Chiller (1994, writtenunderthepseudonymSterlingBlake,revisedandrepublishedbyBenford underhisownnamein2011asChiller:AScientificSuspenseNovel).Benford’smove into genetics research involved mastery of a whole new discipline—indeed, a second scientific career. In this area, in fact, he has undertaken a third career as commentator on the culture and politics of science today, writing in journals such as Nature, as well as in his blog Benford and Rose: Essays and Articles, the New Science (www.benford-rose.com). He has written interesting scientific papers on ecological issues and climate change. He has always been pessimistic about mankind’s ability to deal with its environment, yet he continues to propose interesting solutions. Benford’s alternate career as science fiction writer is equally distinguished, and that is the subject of this book. It was in Germany that Benford’s interest in SF became manifest: here, with brother Jim, he organized a fan convention and launched the fanzine Void, which was later to attract SF figures such as editors Ted White and Terry Carr, the latter an important force in shaping the “newwave”of the1960sand1970s,whenBenfordbeganhisprofessionalwriting career. His first professional sale was “Stand In,” published in F & SF in 1965, while a graduate student at UC San Diego. Since, he has published more than twenty novels, over one hundred short stories, some fifty essays, and myriad articles. Despite his Genescient adventure, Benford has not abandoned writing science fiction. Recently he has written and published a number of books, freely exploring the new e-book format. His novel The Sunborn (2007), a sequel to The Martian Race, was his first e-book venture. The years 2011 and 2012 have seen a rebirth of Benford the writer in all formats—fiction and nonfiction, hard SF and fantasy. Today he moves seamlessly from self-published work to the bestseller list. Under the Lucky Bat e-format, he published in rapid succession: a revised version of Chiller (2011), a collection of short stories and novellas, Anomalies (2012), and a curious novella Down the River Road (2012), described in the promotional literature as “a backwoods fantasy in a riverland derived from mysterious science indistinguishable from magic.” Electronic media allow the author to create a web of commentary around his e-publications. In IntroduCtIon 3 this regard, see Benford’s website (www.gregorybenford.com, an umbrella site with links to “recent posts,” “Benford’s blog cloud,” and ancillary sites). One of the most successful editors in the fanzine world, Benford has mastered the new electronic form of literary dissemination. Benford, man of many careers, has received numerous awards and prizes in all areas of activity. He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Cambridge Visiting Fellow in physics, an advisor to NASA, and more recently to the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Council on Space Politics. In 1995 he was awarded the coveted Lord...