Gregory Benford

Chapter 1: Gregory Benford

Chapter1 GREGORy BENFORD The Scientist as Writer Throughout his long career as science fiction writer, Gregory Benford has remained steadfast in his claim that science is at the center both of the twentieth century and of the form of literature he sees as its central mode of expression. What else should SF deal with than the impact of scientific ideas and discoveries on society and the individual? Remarks he made to physics graduate students at UCSD in 1985 are typical: “Science is the mainspring of this century. Historians will call this the century of science . . . because it is where it became obvious that the big driving term in the equation of society is science.”1 Clearly he sees these remarks to be valid for the twenty-first century as well, as he chose to reprint them verbatim in 2005. This is a restatement of Isaac Asimov’s famous definition of “social science fiction” as the literature that deals with the impact of scientific and technological advancement on human beings. Benford, however, has a deeper historical sense of this process. He realizes that this impact did not begin just in the twentieth century. In his 6 Chapter 1 fiction and nonfiction he reveals a deep understanding of the philosophical currents born, as early as the Western seventeenth century, from the impact of scientific discovery on conventional worldviews. This engenders profound changes in the way—if we play by the new rules of science—in which we see the world. The literature that responds to these changing worldviews must of necessity be an experimental one, perhaps the only really experimental form of literature modern mankind has. Science has radically altered conventional ways of seeing space, time, and mankind’s relation to the physical world; so must it do for narrative forms as well. Benford imagines physical environments in which human activity becomes radically problematic, if not unthinkable, and thus unnarratable in terms of conventional fictional structures, governed by a Newtonian stability. His writing faces technical challenges other writers, even many SF writers, habitually avoid. This is because he insists on writing “with the net up,” strictly adhering to the laws of physics rather than conveniently “suspending disbelief.” He is, in perhaps all the history of science fiction, the one writer who most successfully synthesizes the often-contradictory demands of science and fiction. Common wisdom today tends to oppose science and literature as having opposite, even antagonistic, goals. This makes Benford’s synthesis all the more interesting. The problems he wrestles with as writer, given his sense of the ideas and world models that issue from scientific inquiry, are fundamentally philosophical rather than social. His work is philosophical fiction of the highest order. SCIENCE AND FICTION Benford is extremely well read in the history of science, and he often reveals his sources. In many other instances, however, it is clear that he is dealing with concepts whose basic source is unmentioned but which remain underlying problems for science today. As well, Benford is one of the rare writers who seeks to anchor the origins of science fiction in the origins of scientific thought. Science fiction has taken a long time to define itself, to gain a clear sense of its generic identity. Benford sees this problem, historically, as having much to do with the difficult relation between the two terms that have come to describe it: science and fiction. Both terms, as we know them today, came into being in the seventeenth century. The new methods and vision of the scientific revolution were codified in the work of thinkers and writers like the sCIentIst as wrIter 7 Descartes and Pascal. In their work, the vision of the new science challenges the conventional worldviews—religious and moral—that were, and remain, deeply imbedded in human fictions and stories. The works of a Pascal are not science fiction as we know it. But they do offer mini-narratives that suggest the possibility of a literary form that deals with Asimov’s impact of scientific and technological advancement on human beings. The idea is profoundly simple. But it took a long time in Western literary history for this definition to yield a clearly identifiable literary genre. Part of the problem involves the nature of the scientific method, which is experimental, tentative, and open-ended by nature. Science’s findings increasingly contradict the classical human-centered worldview. Science then, for Benford, is the scientific method...