regory Benford is one of the two or three leading exponents of hard science
fiction writing today, an heir to the throne of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov ... which is not surprising, considering that he is also a theoretical and
experimental physicist. What may be more surprising is that Benford is
also one of the most thoughtful prose stylists working today in
any genre. Combine his scientific acumen and experience with his literary
talent and sheer storytelling ability and the result is ... well, out of
this world. Benford has won every major SF award, as well as many
prestigious national and international prizes for his scientific work.
He is perhaps best known for his Galactic Center novels, which together
constitute one of the most ambitious and enthralling sagas in all of science
fiction: the epic tale of a star-spanning civilization of intelligent
machines methodically working to exterminate a species of pestiferous vermin
that calls itself humanity. His novel Cosm is being made into a motion
picture. Recently Benford spoke to Science Fiction Weekly about his new novel, Eater, and about the challenges we pestiferous vermin face in this new century and
beyond.
In addition to being an award-winning science fiction writer, you are a scientist of considerable distinction, a professor of plasma physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Irvine. How well do these two vocations and ways of looking at the world mesh? Does the SF writer in you ever try to shoulder the physicist aside in the midst of an experiment, or has the scientist had to rein in the imagination of the writer?
Benford: There is a tension between the two, of course--the factual world vs. the imaginative one. Yet science skates between these two, as do I. Often, as in Cosm, which is set in my own physics department and in the present, I merge the two worlds in a playful way. But imagination is crucial to science, for that's where we get the hypotheses which grunt labor can then check. Writing, I often find choices between scientific plausibility and plot necessity. I generally side with making the science at least sound firm. This unavoidable stress comes from a fidelity to the material that, for example, robs much media "sci-fi" of its integrity and power. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey was absolutely hard-edged, yet concluded with a transcendent, metaphorical climax, cashing conceptual checks it had accrued the balance to cover. Contrast this with the current Mission to Mars, trying to ape this strategy with a plausible mission plan and unlikely high jinks at every turn, then simmered in a sauce of sentimentality. The result is a film that seems to have been made by children with too much money and time on their hands, and no ideas.
Your new novel, Eater, features an alien intelligence housed within the magnetic field of a wandering black hole. Yet despite its godlike qualities, the Eater proves to be as bound by the laws of physics as we are. Do you believe there are limits to what is possible in the universe and in science fiction?
Benford: Limits define us and our works. A sonnet with 20 unrhymed lines isn't a bad sonnet, it's no sonnet at all. The Eater is the nearest thing I could imagine to the Old Testament God of Job. It's thoroughly allowed by physics, and more appalling for just that reason. Immortal, too.
By the end of Eater, I found myself wondering about the phenomenon of consciousness and how much we really understand about it.
Benford: My favorite definition of consciousness is very general, so applies to any substrate: the ability to model both the external world and the internal world, so one is aware of one's position in the whole. Then you can model others' intelligences and anticipate their moves and needs. Throughout Eater, such modeling fails, as we meet a mind quite alien. But not every idea fails.
Your work is often praised for offering realistic portraits of scientists, as if scientists were an exotic, not wholly human, species. Less commented upon but equally noteworthy, it seems to me, is the humanity of your scientists.
Benford: I cover a piece of the literary landscape long neglected, a class of huge impact in society, yet not fathomed by many. Scientists have an oblique view of the world, one they convey poorly to their public, alas. They even penalize those who try; witness Carl Sagan's being denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, a resounding stupidity backed particularly by the high-energy physicists...whom I roundly satirized in Cosm, incidentally.
The character of Channing Knowlton, bravely battling cancer throughout the novel, is one of your most fully realized creations ... certainly among the most intensely imagined female characters you've written. Did you feel a special bond there?
Benford: I liked her a lot, knowing she was doomed all along. But I felt a stronger connection to Alicia of Cosm, a sassy black woman. And Julia the biologist in The Martian Race I felt close to as well. Odd, I hadn't noticed that I've used female characters so centrally of late.
Why is that, do you think?
Benford: I do feel that women are more dramatically interesting than men because they have more real choices in our time. They must balance marriage vs. profession, children vs. others, more than males do, precisely because they can and do move fluidly from one sphere to another. Men know they will work all their lives, period.
In your Nebula Award-winning novel Timescape, you wrote about the attempts of a future reality to communicate with its own past in order to change history and prevent an ecological disaster. Has time been kind to the temporal speculations of that novel?
Benford: More than I expected, yes. David Deutsch took the book's central physics and created a mathematical theory of time travel using alternate universes. He even wrote a book about it, never referencing Timescape ... academic careerism at work, I'm afraid. So the novel's ideas have moved far further to the center of thinking about time, and everybody now knows of time's centrality to modern theory, especially in choosing among string theories on the current menu.
Your Galactic Center novels tell of the conflict between human and machine intelligences. How likely do you think it is that an artificial machine or computer intelligence will arise (or has already done so somewhere in the cosmos), and is there any reason to suppose it would be hostile to humans?
Benford: I just attended a one-day conference on the implications of alien artificial intelligences, at NASA's Ames Center in the Bay Area. I believe such AAIs would be a good long-term bet for SETI, and so support a beacon-seeking strategy for radio listening, over the current search of the nearest 155 light years (1,000 stars of G type). But indeed, some AAIs may be hostile to expansive organic forms, afraid they'll eat up the galaxy's resources, which a truly long-lived culture would want to husband. We might look like scavengers to them. I wrote the Galactic Center series to explore those ideas in an exhaustive six novels over 25 years. Whoosh!
In all your fiction, the universe teems with life and intelligence. And in fact, here on Earth we're finding that life does not merely exist but thrives under the harshest, most seemingly inhospitable conditions. Do you believe there is a creative, anti-entropic force at work in the universe that favors the development and evolution of life?
Benford: I suspect so, and support two experiments to test the idea: looking for life beneath Mars, and an expanded SETI search along the lines I just mentioned. Enough theorizing! We need hard data. Only then will we know if the universe's laws favor intelligence, as I suspect.
It's perhaps strange to speak of the regional roots of a science fiction writer. Yet I can't help feeling that your Southern heritage had a lot to do with the Galactic Center novels, in which a decimated humanity fights on in a glorious "lost cause" against technologically and numerically superior mech opponents.
Benford: Good insight. I recently wrote an essay, "The South in Science Fiction," touching on this, which I'll probably install on my Web site, (www.gregorybenford.com. Up soon, I hope.) The Bishop family of the Galactic Center novels comes from my cousins, the Bishops, and they speak with a Southern accent, typical of Fairhope, Alabama, where I grew up (to the extent that I ever did). Yes, what does appeal about the Lost Cause? And could humanity become one?
What writers and scientists have influenced you the most?
Benford: Oh, geez ... Hemingway and Heinlein, Faulkner and Forward ... many. Dyson and Einstein, Minsky and Fermi (the last great physicist to do both experiment and theory, as I've tried to do myself). Many.
What is your favorite among your novels?
Benford: Against Infinity--the easiest to write, too. An odd choice, I know.
What can you tell us about the feature film being made of Cosm?
Benford: It's stalled in Development Hell at Fox: Jan de Bont as director, with loose agreements to participate by Dustin Hoffman and Angela Bassett. Looking for a Big Deal Scriptwriter to do a better job than the last one. Less than ten percent of all bought projects in Hollywood get made, remember.
I'll resist the temptation to ask about the search for intelligent life in Hollywood and ask instead about this brave new century of ours. Will our species survive its wonders and terrors?
Benford: Sure, easily. We're mean, stupid, ugly, and the terror of all other species but we're damned hard to kill.
