Gregory Benford

Chapter 8. Benford's Short Fiction

Chapter8 BENFORD’S SHORT FICTION Since his first published story “Stand In” appeared in 1965 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Gregory Benford has published a large number of short stories in magazines and in anthologies. He collected many of his best stories in two landmark volumes—In Alien Flesh (1986), and Matter’s End (1990). These were followed by three more recent anthologies—Worlds Vast and Various (1999), Immersion and Other Short Novels (2002), and Anomalies: Collected Stories (2012). The short story is often seen as the essential form for science fiction. Indeed, many of the most revered SF novels have their beginning as an idea-packed short story, which the author subsequently elaborates (often with less success) into a larger narrative. Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” is an example, where a story generates not just a single novel but a series of novels. Benford has followed this process. For example, his novel Eater (1999) is clearly an expansion of his classic story “Exposures.” Indeed, in the introduction to his most recent e-book anthology, Anomalies (2012), Benford Benford’s short fICtIon 155 openly admits to writing “concept stories”: “Here . . . are stories written to size, mostly for the science journal Nature, whose Futures page each issue is the most read item in the magazine. Generally, you have time to deliver only the idea, a tight constraint.”1 In fact, Benford is such a good SF short story writer precisely because so many of his stories have this “tight constraint,” in the sense that they skillfully present a big idea in a small space. Generally, however, Benford the short story writer is less interested in sketching “concepts ” than in the craft of the short story itself, whose essence, whatever the genre, is to present a crucial situation that calls upon the reader to imagine its elaboration beyond the boundaries of the narrative. The best of Benford’s stories are stand-alone classics in this manner. In a sense, American science fiction, with its publishing roots in magazines and digests where most major writers got their start, has kept the short story form alive, even contributed to its development, across the twentieth century. SF has produced many masterpieces of short fiction, both in terms of speculative content and experimental form. Notable examples are the stories and novellas produced by Robert A. Heinlein from 1939 to 1944. Great SF stories—again attempting to narrate situations born of advanced scientific speculation—continue to be written at the end of the twentieth century. Striking examples are Robert Silverberg’s “Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another” (1989) and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1991). Generally, many of the best SF stories avoid the perceived trap of mainstream literary “exhaustion” by demanding that their readers take a speculative or hypothetical situation as literal reality. The experiment here is that of a protagonist actually living in a world that is new and untested. Many of Benford’s stories are benchmark examples of this sort of experimental science fiction storytelling. To conclude this book, I first look in detail at two stories—one from In Alien Flesh, the other from Matter’s End. The stories are “Exposures” (1981) and “Mozart on Morphine” (1989). Both have a working scientist as protagonist, whose activity in the narrative is the professional one of doing science. Both have strong autobiographical elements. But, though a scant eight years separates these stories, they move in very different directions. “Exposures” looks back to Nigel Walmsley and the Benford of the 1970s, fascinated with alien sightings. “Mozart on Morphine” takes its direction from Markham’s inner musings in Timescape. In each case, these stories are philosophical tales, that 156 Chapter 8 pursue the human implications of the new—and supremely alien—worlds brought forth by modern physics and mathematics. “Exposures” is considered by many to be Benford’s paradigmatic narrative of scientists “doing science.” By this is meant the mundane work of professional scientists, working in the modern context of an institution, a university or a private laboratory, in contrast to the “lone genius” figure who continues to appear in Golden Age science fiction. An example of this latter figure is Heinlein’s Waldo. Even so, American SF during the 1950s seriously clipped the wings of the lone genius. Growing cold war fears of atomic holocaust led to works like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz...