Gregory Benford

Chapter 3: Fictional Directions

Chapter3 FICTIONAL DIRECTIONS The Makings of a Scientist-Writer Gregory Benford is a writer who came up through the science fiction pathway, but he, like many of his generation, had ambitions to break out of the SF ghetto, to write literature. In Benford’s case, the goal from the outset was to write serious fiction about the new world that science offered to mankind, and to present, in fictional works, the scientist’s role in shaping and understanding that brave new world. Like so many SF writers, Benford wrote in fan publications, then moved to publishing stories in science fiction magazines. From there, he began producing novels, and a successful writing career was launched. He published his first novel in 1970. The decade that followed, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, was a formative period of intense creative activity for the author. During this period, Benford produced two masterpieces : In the Ocean of Night (1976), and Timescape (1980). Both are set in the author’s near future. But the former novel leads directly toward high space adventure at the Galactic Center. The latter work occupies the here and now; 46 Chapter 3 it offers but a fleeting glimpse of future promise, Benford’s famous sideward tilt, his sudden “trap door” into infinite vistas. These are the two directions Benford’s subsequent fiction will take. Yet they intertwine in subtle ways. In order to understand the nature of this interweaving of fictional directions, it is necessary to examine other early works, works that are excellent in their own right but have been overshadowed by these two novels. By exploring the byways of Benford’s fiction, I hope to see how the author came to explore these disparate-seeming fictional possibilities, and how both, at the beginnings of his writing career, find their common focus in the defining of a single character type—the scientist, or person of scientific vision, at work doing science. In the Ocean of Night and Timescape will be discussed in later chapters devoted to the fictional works they generate. In this chapter, I propose to focus on two “bookend” novels, works that offer the opening and closing statements of this formative decade. On one hand, there is Benford’s first novel, the space opera Deeper than the Darkness (1970). On the other, there is Against Infinity (1983), a work that seems to stand alone yet is crucial to our understanding of the many faces of the Benford mono-hero and the many directions his quest must take. Deeper than the Darkness springs directly from the matrix of science fiction writing. What that matrix was during Benford’s first years as a writer needs to be elucidated. His first piece of published fiction was the story “Stand In,” which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (June 1965). Given its initial orientation, F&SF seems an odd initial venue for a writer of scientific background. Yet by the mid-1960s, this magazine had evolved into a meeting ground of diverse tendencies. Under the editorship of Ed Ferman (1966–1991), the magazine, now in digest form and rebaptised The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, published a varied and heterogeneous slate of works, from Heinlein’s “Starship Soldier” (novel Starship Troopers) to works by Fritz Leiber, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter M. Miller’s Canticle novellas. Its long-running science column was written by Isaac Asimov (1958–1992), the apostle of “social science fiction.” Benford returned to F&SF in April 1969 with a novella, “Deeper than the Darkness.” Ace Books published an expanded version in 1970, the 190-page novel Deeper than the Darkness. This work has its origins in the various and often contradictory currents outlined above. In its attempt to synthesize them, it is a curious and fascinating work. fICtIonal dIreCtIons 47 A few words about Ace Books is in order. Benford’s first novel is, by virtue of its cover art and packaging, “space opera.” But it is an example, somewhat belated, of the transformation of space adventure fiction that took place in the Ace Doubles series, from the mid-1950s through the mid1960s . During this period, editor Donald Wollheim put back to back some surprising combinations of new and old variations on space opera: Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery paired with Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump (1955), Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets with Andrew North’s [André Norton’s] Sargasso of Space...