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Chapter 4: Galactic Center One
- University of Illinois Press
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Chapter4 GALACTIC CENTER ONE Benford’s Space Epic The works that make up the series of Benford novels commonly called the Galactic Center saga span nineteen years of the author’s career. They encompass as well a changing landscape of science fiction, in which space adventure, once central to the genre, becomes a near relic. The first novel, In the Ocean of Night (1977), is close enough to the Apollo program and an iconic work like Clarke’s and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to reflect the period’s spirit of high adventure in the promise of space travel. Even so, on opening this novel, we know immediately that ten years have passed since those glory days. NASA has become an administrative drudge, and Earth’s environment and its political situation are, beyond the Cold War equation, on the verge of collapse. In the subsequent novels, produced in the cyberpunk era, Benford seems to take refuge from this trend in the increasingly arcane physics of spacetime. Rather than deal with social, environmental, and political issues cyberpunk raises, he continues to do what he has always done as a science fiction writer—pursue the 78 Chapter 4 question of mankind’s condition in the face of science’s genuinely expanding universe. This encounter between mankind and the physical universe remains Benford’s core concern across his career. The venues of encounter become increasingly more inventive, indeed wildly so, in the Galactic Center series. But the terms of this encounter do not change; they simply become clearer. For in the end, the ultimate context of human evolution is no longer Descartes’s mind-matter opposition. Nor is it some cosmic competition between organic and machine intelligence. It is the vaster, ever-evolving struggle of sentient Life to abide and evolve in a universe of blind, inert forces. The Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny, at the end of the nineteenth century, accorded the possibility of sentient life to iron-based forms. For him, the limits of sentience was the inert mineral kingdom. As we shall see, for Benford’s Galactic Center explorers, this limit no longer holds. Despite the immense sweep of spacetime, the central figure of Benford’s Galactic series will remain Nigel Walmsley, the maverick NASA astronaut who dominates In the Ocean of Night and its sequel, Across the Sea of Suns (1984). He continues to mark his presence as the cosmic landscape expands. He returns, as what seems a series of “manifestations,” in the strange timescape of the final novel, Sailing Bright Eternity (1996). Nigel’s initial adventure is relived by other like figures—Killeen, his son Toby—as individual mankind expands its spacetime horizons across this sea of suns. Benford’s transformation of conventional space opera in The Stars in Shroud now expands to become a work deserving of the term “space epic.” Born in the matrix of Clarke’s 2001, Nigel is a space-age Odysseus—a crafty, restless, forward-looking intelligence for whom the going out, encounters with the ineffable alien, must always remain a coming home. But although Benford’s protagonists in the later novels remain avatars of Nigel, there is more to Galactic Center than the adventure of a single individual. The figures who follow in Nigel’s footsteps are asked to do something he did not do—to assume the responsibility of the human tribe and community, who are now faced with relentless attempts by machine adversaries not just to annihilate them, but to manipulate them to its own ends. These are issues faced by that other epic hero, Aeneas, on his trek from Troy to Rome, a new place where he seeks, against mighty odds, to recreate a semblance of lost Trojan society. His destination then, analogous to Benford’s Galactic Center, is a potentially hostile place of inscrutable gods [100.26.140.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:56 GMT) GalaCtIC Center one 79 and forces. The adventures of Killeen and Toby are closer to those of Aeneas than to those of Odysseus. The final novel in Benford’s series will seek to reconcile these epic strains in a physical world beyond human scale and perhaps comprehension. The term “epic” is not used lightly here. In fact, Benford’s series seems to corroborate the often-made claim that science fiction is the epic form of the scientific twentieth century. A series like Star Trek follows the paradigm of the Homeric epic as the collective story of a people and culture...