e enter here, against the arrow of time, a book which is not unweird. Beyond Infinity, as Gregory Benford tells us in an afterword that I (for one) could have made good use of before beginning the actual story, is a kind of rewrite of Beyond the Fall of Night (1990), the novella he composed as a sequel to Arthur C Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, a Scientific Romance on the Far Future which Clarke began to write in 1937 and first published in magazine form in 1948, when Benford was seven; it appeared as a book in 1953. Clarke himself utterly rethought and rewrote his tale as The City and the Stars (1956), but Benford's 1990 sequel takes off from the first version. His 2004 tale, though technically a singleton, perches, in fact, at the top of a tall tree, from which coign of vantage it assiduously reflects its roots. Beyond Infinity may ostensibly bend its synopticon gaze on the universe a billion years hence, but that gaze is a gaze out of the last century.
In fact it goes further back than that. At the end of the nineteenth century, H.G. Wells used the term Scientific Romance to describe his early novels, which included The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898) and When the Sleeper Awakes (1899). It may be the case that these novels, when reprinted by Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s as examples of how to do SF, had a shaping influence on American genre fiction before John W. Campbell stamped out the Don A. Stuart in his soul and faced forward; but in general those influenced back then by Wells picked up more on the fecundity of his imagination than on the implications of his stories. The Scientific Romance, which Wells founded and Olaf Stapledon took to the stars, is a very British, very recessional sort of SF (Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional," which sees the British Empire as "one with Ninevah and Tyre!", was first published in 1897). Wells and his followers were deeply affected by the Darwinian revolution, whose long-term perspectives they built into their tales.
Scientific Romances tended to contemplate great temporal vistas through the eyes of protagonists who were, indeed, mostly eyes—points of view on changes too vast to shape with human hands. The underlying drift of the Scientific Romance, a drift which befits an Empire in decline, is that the human species occupies a brief moment in a universe which itself ages inexorably, and that it is the author's job to educate us into understanding our spear-carrier role in the long passages of the play of Time. Amercan SF, before and after Campbell, tended not to take this message. When he wanted to sell to American markets, Arthur C. Clarke himself tended to write stories like "Rescue Mission" (1946 in Astounding); Against the Fall of Night and Childhood's End (1953) were only properly published after he'd established his name. And the contemplative swing and swayback of Benford's strange new/old novel also, perhaps, reflects its author's awareness that his name is safe.
A billion years of infodump
As in Cosm, Benford has elected in Beyond Infinity to inhabit a female protagonist. Her name is Cley, which in French means key, which is, of course, a pure Scientific Romance kind of name: because keys do not turn themselves, keys are turned. ... And so with Cley. She is an Ur-Human on an Earth which has seen and suffered under innumerable evolutions and transformations of the original stock; her Ur-Human genome is itself a retro creation on the part of evolved humans attempting to recapture time past, and to do other stuff. She is a key in their hands, and in the hands of others, too. A multi-dimensional entity called the Malign is threatening the universe, after having been imprisoned aeons earlier by the highly evolved humans who experienced a Quickening, which Benford says was also called a Singularity, and who became known as the Singular. It never becomes absolutely clear (at least to me) why Cley is the key that will turn the lock back on the Malign, but (at a guess) what she provides the fatally reasonable Supra stock of a billion years hence is an intensity of being. Ur-Humans live in the flesh, which they are bound to, and which (as it were) magnetizes their passage through Time. Ur-Humans are all story.
Sadly, Beyond Infinity is so tied to its Scientific Romance-tinged educative remit—for there are a billion years of history to infodump into poor Cley's merely human skull, and hence into ours—that very little in the way of story gets told in anything like an active voice. The most interesting character in the book is a raccoonlike procyon named Seeker, who provides some comic relief at first, before turning into Something Else (a transformation more than amply telegraphed in the text), perhaps Gaia squared. But Seeker, who is far more warmly described than poor gawky Cley, does make her seem human at times. And their experiences in various dimensions, though laboriously educative, generate some remote fun.
Cley is brought up in a Meta (Benford's use of a desiccated 1930s nomenclature—Meta for metafamily, Supras, Malign, Singular, Magnetics, Multifold, etc., etc.—is clearly part of his retrospective strategy, and does therefore constitute an homage to very early Clarke; but there are points when Beyond Infinity becomes almost too bloodless to read). She has a bunch of Moms but her Father has decamped, so she fixates on substitute Supra dads, who normally live in Supra cities called Sonomulia and Illusivia, and sleeps with them (offstage). But the plot soon breaks this up. What we eventually learn is the Malign kills off all Ur-Humans except Cley, upon whom the fate of the universe now turns, as she will have to serve as conduit—an earth, a story—through which the affirmers of the passage of Time will be able to neutralize the Malign.
The heart of SF is still beating
This is all good stuff, but Benford affords it very little space. What he is mostly interested in is the clean play of ideas about the universe; these thoughts, which are clearly derived mostly from physics and math, are, after their Scientific Romance fashion, dryly fecund. But they are very 20th century. Though he gives lip service to the filthy fecundity of biology, we do not get much sense of the rag and bone shop of evolution, the microbial factories which shape the leaky organs of species. When he speaks of artificial intelligence, he speaks of "bots" which, fatally inorganic (unlike the computers of, say, 2006), transform Earth for a while into a clean-cut autoclave called the Dry (another 1930s term). The play on Arthur C. Clarke's own recessional dryness of diction is, perhaps, entirely deliberate; but this does not make Beyond Infinity any less odd.
There are redeeming moments, all the same. Close to the end, Cley has a vision of some abiding under-story which carries the human species, as though on wings, through Time. It is Benford at his best, and it is a fine pure description of the vision at the heart of the Scientific Romance:
And across the span of the immense wings nestled small, fevered mites. .. Across the wingspan lay ages of greatness and long nights of despair. But always the ferment, the jutting towers of boundless ambition, the dusty ruins brought by wear and failure. ...
Mites. Pests.
Gathered in time's long tapestry, on the back of the eagle. They milled and fought and saw only their limited moment. They did not know that they flew between unreadable spheres, in the perfumed air of vast night.
