Essays

by Gregory Benford

  Do you think that Alicia Butterworth's discovery, what she christens the Cosm, is just a flight of fancy, or is it the sort of thing you wholly expect to be reading about in Scientific American someday?

  Well, I think in terms of theory, I'll certainly be reading about it, because the theory is too interesting to leave alone. Now, whether we actually produce one or not is up for grabs. That's the reason people worry about this. I think the chances are small, because you're trying to produce an incredibly dense mass energy. But we don't know quantum mechanically what the probability is that we can, as we say, tunnel through to that state.

  After I'd finished reading Cosm, I re-read an essay by Oscar Wilde called "The Decay of Lying," and in that essay Wilde states that "there is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true." Now, you're a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, writing about a physicist at the University of California, Irvine. Do you find that looking into a mirror, so to speak, as you write, is more of a help or a hindrance to you in creating your novel's reality?

  Well, it's a great deal of help, actually, because all kinds of local details come readily to hand. However, Alicia Butterworth is really not me. Some reviewers seem to have been confused about this.

  I thought Max Jalon was probably you, actually.

  Well, more like me. But, I deliberately portrayed [Alicia Butterworth] as being a really bothered personality, someone who's irritable, with an odd set of opinions, that are not necessarily my opinions. One in particular kept trying to attribute her views to me.

  I think even I did that in my review, and I realize there's a danger and a fallacy in attributing things that characters say or do to the actions or views of the author, but one of the reasons why that might be the case is that many of the characters seem kind of amoral, in the sense that there doesn't seem to be a lot of positive images in the book. That was one of my questions for you: Is the novel's reality your own world-view, or is it more "through a glass darkly"? And I think you just answered it.

  Do you believe the universe is the result of intelligent design and forethought, the serendipitous by-product of an alien science experiment, or simply a completely random, if fortuitous, event?

  I think the first of the choices. The fact that the universe has law in it implies that there is an ordering principle.

  So you're not inclined to Max Jalon's view at the end of the book?

  No, though it's fun.

  That was one thing that confused me that I mentioned in my review. In that particular section, I couldn't tell if you were being very dead-pan or giving the reader something that Max Jalon is just having some fun with.

  Both. I mean, he supposes it, and at that point, I wanted the readers to catch on to the idea. Whether that's amusing or not is a matter of taste.

  I had two more questions to ask. One of these is that there are a lot of negative things voiced in the book. What are some things you look at positively, and do you think Alicia would look positively on the same things?

  Well, there's always students, and reaching people in a new way. It's the tendency of universities to become not just bureaucracies, but top-down structures, that I dislike. The students are a good antidote to that.

  I imagine over the last month you've been asked a lot of questions about Cosm at signings and readings. Is there one question you wish someone had asked you that nobody has?

  No one has asked me why I chose to use a black protagonist, and the answer was, I wanted someone who was different, and who actually violated the conventions. Her opinions don't fit any rule.

  Actually, I found the black protagonist refreshing, because it let you do some things that I think if your protagonist had been white, you would have had people picketing outside your office. I especially found her comments about Maya Angelou to be refreshing and possibly truer than even she intended.

  Oh, indeed. There, actually, I agree with Alicia. I've always thought Maya Angelou was a dreadful poet. Now the Washington Post review called me out on exactly that issue. Called it "mean-spirited" to regard Maya Angelou as being anything but a wonderful poet, but in fact, she's dreadful.

  Do you think that may be the reason -- not the Maya Angelou part -- why no one has asked you that question; because to ask it is to indicate that maybe the questioner is somehow not quite "with it"?

  Sure. I think you're undoubtedly right about that. People are uncomfortable about it. I'm not uncomfortable about racial issues. I grew up among blacks....

  Where did you grow up?

  Southern Alabama.

  I guess you're like me, then. I haven't managed to pick up a southern accent, yet.

  I can change my accent any time you want. [Dr. Benford says this in a Southern drawl.]

  [Laughing] And sometimes when you're in the South, that's very useful. Well, listen, I want to thank you for your time this evening. I know you've probably got some things you need to do.

  Yes.

  It sounds a little like you found something to eat.

  Yes, actually I'm eating some almonds. By the way, I missed your review. Where did you say it was up?

  It's the SF Site at www.sfsite.com. And you'll probably discover I'm a little out-spoken, but I mentioned I thought the book was well-structured and it's one of the few things I've seen recently that I read in a couple sittings. I actually put some stuff off to get through it.

  Well, great. That's the kind of response I want. My actual name for this book is a scientific suspense novel. This one isn't really a thriller. That's why I was surprised when we got a really good movie deal for it about four weeks ago from FOX.

  So, major release type movie, not made-for-TV type movie?

  No. A feature-length film.

  My suspicion is they would love it, because I can't remember a lot of scenes where they're going to have to do a lot of special effects.

  There are now.

  Oh, really?

  They had me write in the treatment a whole new third act, so now there's a whole new ending where things get much worse.

  That was one thing. I thought it was a little bit of a cop-out when you left that enormous sphere at the end.

  That's exactly what they said. "This is a second ticking bomb you can use."

  Well, I'm definitely looking forward to that. I'm trying to figure out who they will cast as Alicia Butterworth.

  Uh, Angela Bassett. Well, that's who they've been talking about. In fact, I just got done with a conference call to Dustin Hoffman's people as a possibility for Max. Well, I'm trying not to worry about it. On to the next project.

  What is the next project?

  I'm doing a novel for Avon, the working title of which is Eater.

  [At this point, realizing that it was dinner time on the West coast, I let Dr. Benford go.]

  Copyright © 1998 by Stephen M. Davis

  Steve is faculty member in the English department at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, S.C. He holds a master's in English Literature from Clemson University. He was voted by his high school class as Most Likely to Become a Young Curmudgeon.

  Deep Time

  At its best, science fiction isn't just "fiction about science" -- it is science thinking about itself as a human agenda in the dimension of time. It necessarily speculates, making ranging forays into territories seldom illuminated coherently in our era of intense narrowness.

  Any science fiction author hopes he gets the science right enough not to wrinkle the brow of real scientists. I am a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, but SF demands a broad knowledge no one can be sure of mastering.

  So I hope specialists in the many areas I touch will not find my leaps into the cutting edge of assorted sciences too rough. Wherever possible, I've cemented my intuitions with travel, visits and detailed consultation. I feel that conclusions won from experience have a solidity that armchair ruminations do not.

  Outright speculation is not rare in proper science, bu
t it often arrives well disguised. Sometimes it is a short-term claim to a notion awaiting exploration, as when James Watson and Francis Crick laconically noted in the last sentence of their paper reporting the discovery of DNA's double helix that they saw the implications for reproduction: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

  Our time can benefit from the vistas made possible by science and science fiction alike. When hatred and technology can slaughter millions in months, such terrors deprive life of that quality made scarce and most precious to the modern mind: meaning. SF gives us perspectives, and so redeems this lack, rendering the human prospect again large and portentous. We gain stature alongside the enormities of both space and time.

  As a physicist, I've learned that the different branches of science lend their followers an intuitive grasp of long scales. Archeologists sense the rise and fall of civilizations by sifting through debris. They are intimately aware of how past societies mismanaged their surroundings and plunged down the slope of collapse, sometimes with startling speed.

  Biologists track the extinction of whole genera and, in the random progressions of evolution, apprehend a sweep of time far greater than the whole of human history. Darwinism invokes cumulative changes that can act quickly on insects, while mammals take millions of decades to alter. Our own evolution has tuned our sense of probabilities to work within a narrow lifetime, blinding us to the slow sway of long biological time. This may well be why the theory of evolution came so recently; it conjures up spans beyond our intuition. On the creative scale of the great, slow and blunt Darwinnowings such as we see in the fossil record, no human monument can endure. But our neophyte species can now bring extinction -- which is forever -- to many others.

  In their careers, astronomers discern the grand gyre of worlds. But planning, building, flying and analyzing one mission to the outer solar system commands the better part of a professional life. Future technologies beyond the chemical rocket may change this, but there are vaster spaces beckoning, which can still consume a career. A mission scientist invests the kernel of his most productive life in a single gesture toward the infinite.

  Those who study stars blithely discuss stellar lifetimes encompassing billions of years. In measuring the phases of stellar mortality, they employ the many examples, young and old, that hang in the sky. We see suns in snapshot, a tiny sliver of their grand and gravid lives caught in our telescopes. Cosmologists peer at distant reddened galaxies and see them as they were before Earth existed. Observers measure the microwave emission that is relic radiation from the earliest detectable signal of the universe's hot birth. Studying this energetic emergence of all that we can know surely imbues (and perhaps afflicts) astronomers with a perception of how like mayflies we are.

  No human enterprise can stand well in the glare of such wild perspectives. Perhaps this is why for some, science comes freighted with coldness, a foreboding implication that we are truly tiny and insignificant on the scale of such eternities. Yet as a species we are young, and promise much. We may come to be true denizens of deep time.

  I tried to get at such issues in my novel, Eater. Like the one before it, Cosm, it deals with humanity seen against the huge backdrop of creation itself. In Cosm, a feisty black woman scientist accidentally creates a whole universe. In Eater, we follow astronomers as they confront what could be described as an embodiment of the Old Testament God -- capricious, strange, with a whim of iron.

  That's the sort of startling problem I like to give myself in a novel -- something I haven't seen done before, or at least not to my liking. Such dramas make one think of humanity as it truly is -- one very successful species that hasn't really had enough time to prove whether it will truly last.

  I find it amusing to think on truly long time scales; it centers the present, between the vast past and the unknowable future.

  For example, though our destiny is forever unclear, surely if we persist for another millennium or two, we shall fracture into several species, as our grasp of our own genome tightens. We will dwell on the scale of a hastening evolution, then, seizing natural mechanisms and turning them to our own tasks. In this sense we will emerge as players in the drama of natural selection, as scriptwriters.

  Our ancient migrations over Earth's surfaces have shaped us into "races" which cause no end of cultural trouble and yet are trivial outcomes of local selection. Expansion into our solar system would exert selective pressure upon traits we can scarcely imagine now, adaptations to weightlessness, or lesser gravity, or other ranges of pressure or temperature. In this context, we will need long memories of what we have been, to keep a bedrock of certainty about what it means to be human. This is the work of deep time messages, as well.

  The larger astronomical scale, too, will beckon us in such a distant era; for well within a millennium we will be able to launch probes to other stars. To ascend the steps of advanced engineering and enter upon the interstellar stage will portend much, introducing human values and perceptions into the theater of suns and solar systems. The essential dilemma of being human -- the contrast between the stellar near-immortalities we see in our night sky and our own all-too-soon, solitary extinctions -- will be even more dramatically the stuff of everyday experience.

  This reminds me of a portion of a favorite poem:

  Here on the level sand

  Between the sea and land,

  What shall I build or write

  Against the fall of night?

  -- A.E. Housman

  What changes might such perspectives presage? We could lend furious energies to the pursuit of immortality, or something approximating it. If today we eliminated all disease and degeneration, accidents alone would kill us within about 1,500 years. Knowing this, would people who enjoyed such lifetimes none the less strive for risk-free worlds, to further escape the shadow of time's erosions?

  On the scale of millennia, threats and prospects alter vastly. Over a few thousand years, the odds that a large asteroid or comet will strike the Earth, obliterating civilization if not humanity, become considerable.

  But if we meet something as truly alien as the Eater Of All Things, all bets are off.

  Old Legends

  This memoir appeared in NEW LEGENDS, edited by Greg Bear, published by Tor Books, August 1995.

  OLD LEGENDS

  A Memoir of Science and Fiction

  Gregory Benford

  copyright 1995 by Abbenford Associates

  Long before I became interested in science itself, I was a science fiction reader. The Space Age changed that in 1957. At the time it seemed that the central metaphor of science fiction had become real, foggy legend condensing into fact.

  I read about Sputnik on the deck of the S.S. America, sailing back from Germany, where I had lived for three years while my father served in the occupying forces. The one-page mimeographed ship's newsletter of October 4 gave that astonishing leap an infuriatingly terse two sentences.

  By the time I re-entered high school in the U.S., just emerging from years when the Cold War seemed to fill every crevice of the world, the previously skimpy curriculum was already veering toward science, a golden, high-minded province. Suddenly I found that I could take a full year of calculus and physics in my senior year. This was quite a change. I put aside my devoted reading of the sf magazines and launched myself into science, the real thing.

  I began to think seriously that a career of simply studying the physical world, which I had often read about in fiction, could be open to such as me. I had done reasonably in high school up until Sputnik, getting Bs and As, but not thinking of myself as one of the really bright members of the class. I imagined that I would probably end up as an engineer, but I really wanted to be a writer. When I scored high in the national scholastic exams of 1958 nobody was more surprised than I. But those scores opened the advanced classes to me in my senior year, and a whole new landscape.

 
; This fresh path led directly to an early afternoon in 1967, when two physicists and a clerk from the Personnel office at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory ushered me into a large office without preamble, and there sat a distracted Edward Teller behind a messy desk piled high with physics journals.

  To my surprise, the other physicists quickly excused themselves and left. Teller was scientific director of the Laboratory then, fabled for his work developing the A-bomb and H-bomb, and his epic split with Robert Oppenheimer.

  They sprang Teller on me without warning. I had gone up to Livermore to discuss working there as a research physicist, following my doctoral thesis at the University of California at San Diego. Nobody told me that Teller insisted on taking the measure of every candidate in the program. "We didn't want you to be nervous," one said later. It worked; I was merely terrified.

  He the most daunting job interviewer imaginable. Not merely a great physicist, he loomed large in one of the central mythologies of modern science fiction, the A-bomb. In the next hour no one disturbed us as Teller quizzed me about my thesis in detail. Attentively he turned every facet over and over, finding undiscovered nuances, some overlooked difficulty, a calculation perhaps a bit askew.

  He was brilliant, leaping ahead of my nervous explanations to see implications I had only vaguely sensed. His mind darted as swiftly as any I had ever encountered, including some Nobel Laureates. To my vast surprise, I apparently passed inspection. At the end, he paused a long moment and then announced that he had "the most important kvestion of all." Leaning closer, he said, "Vill you be villing to vork on veapons?"

  Unbidden, images from Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove leaped to mind. But Teller had impressed me as a deep, reflective man. I said I would -- occasionally, at least. I had grown up deep in the shadow of the Cold War. My father was a career Army officer, and I had spent six years living with my family in occupied post-war Japan and Germany. It seemed to me that the sheer impossibility of using nuclear weapons was the best, indeed the only, way to avoid strategic conventional war, whose aftermath I had seen in shattered Tokyo and Berlin. Paralleling this direct experience was my reading in science fiction, which had always looked ahead at such issues, working out the future implied by current science.