The more ambitious specialists talked of war stars--great bunkers in the sky, able to knock down fleets of missiles. I doubted they could deal with the tens of thousands of warheads that could be launched in a full exchange. Still, to me that fact was a better argument against the existence of those thousands of warheads, rather than an argument against defense.
Finally, we settled on recommending a position claiming at least the moral high ground, if not high orbits. Defense was inevitably more stabilizing than relying on hair-trigger offense, we argued. It was also more principled. And eventually, the Soviet Union might not even be the enemy, we said--though we had no idea it would fade so fast. When that happened, defenses would still be useful against any attacker, especially rogue nations bent on a few terrorist attacks. There were plenty of science fiction stories, some many dacades old, dealing with that possibility.
The Advisory Council met in August of 1984 in a mood of high celebration. Their pioneering work had yielded fruits unimaginable in 1982--Reagan himself had proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, suggesting that nuclear weapons be made "impotent and obsolete." The Soviets were clearly staggered by the prospect. (Years later I heard straight from a senior Soviet advisor that the US SDI had been the straw that broke the back of the military's hold on foreign policy. That seems to be the consensus now among the diplomatic community, though politically SDI is a common whipping boy, its funding cut.)
None of this was really unusual in the history of politics, policy and science fiction. H.G. Wells had visited with both presidents Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and other major figures. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was so dismayed by the Wellsian portrait of a dark future that he asked him to the White House for a long talk about how to avoid drifting that way. Wells's attention to war as the principal problem of the modern era found a ready audience among world leaders. Jules Verne had not commanded such respect in the corridors of power, and no writer since Wells has, but in the late twentieth century it seemed that science fiction's grasp of possibilities was once more called forth, this time by the same government which had fretted over Cleve Cartmill.
In the summer of 1984 all things seemed possible. I was not surprised that Robert Heinlein attended the Advisory Council meetings, dapper and sharp-witted. And out of the summer heat came a surprise visitor -- Arthur C. Clarke, in town to promote the opening of the film made from his novel, 2010. Clarke had testified before congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative, and regarded the pollution of space by weapons, even defensive ones, as a violation of his life's vision.
Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled into Larry Niven's living room. The conversation swirled around technical issues. Could SDI satellites be destroyed by putting into orbit a waiting flock of "smart rocks" (conventional explosives with small rockets attached)? Would SDI lead to further offensive weapons in space?
Behind all this lay a clear clash of personalities. Clarke was taken aback. His old friend Heinlein regarded Clarke's statements as both wrong-headed and rude. Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our self-defense policies, he said. It was, at best, bad manners. Perhaps Clarke was guilty of "British arrogance."
Clarke had not expected this level of feeling among old comrades. They had all believed in the High Church of Space, as one writer present put it. Surely getting away from the planet would diminish our rivalries?
Now each side regarded the other as betraying that vision, of imposing unwarranted assumptions on the future of mankind. It was a sad moment for many when Clarke said a quiet goodbye, slipped out and disappeared into his limousine, stunned.
In that moment I saw the dangers of mingling the visionary elements of sf with the hard-nosed. The field welcomed both, of course, but the world chewed up those of such ample spirit.
Behind much of this was Teller, close advisor to Reagan. He got involved with exotica such as x-ray lasers, which I thought beside the point. The answer lay not in vastly different, new technology, but using tried-and-true methods with a different strategic vision.
I was quite naive about what would follow. While the Soviets got the message quite clearly -- because they watched what we did, and didn't merely listen to the public debate -- and began thinking about throwing in the towel altogether. Meanwhile, over the Strategic Defense Initiative issue Nobel laureates ground their axes, techno-patter rained down, politicians played to the gallery -- ships passing in the night, their fog horns bellowing.
Our present had become, for that sf fan reading a newspaper report of Sputnik, completely science fictional. Even in the 1980s, though, I did not know how deep the science and science fiction connection went.
Old Legends
I had always wondered about Teller's effectiveness at influencing policy. In the 1940s, as James Gleick remarks in Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman, Teller was as imaginative and respected as Feynman. He was the great idea man of the Manhattan Project. So it was natural for me to ask him finally about science fiction's connection with both scientific discovery (tachyons) and science policy (the Manhattan Project).
"For long range thinking I trust in the real visionaries--the ones I prefer to read, at least. The science fiction writers. I haf always liked Mr. Heinlein, Mr. Asimov, of course Mr Clarke --they are much more important in the long run than any Secretary of Defense."
So we talked on about how he had read magazines in the 1940s Los Alamos, bought similar hardbacks as they began to appear in the 1950s, and eventually from the press of events kept up with only a few favorites--the hard sf types, mostly but not exclusively.
He pointed out to me an interesting paragraph in an old paperback.
We were searching...for a way to use U 235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center... If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make almost anybody say 'uncle' to Uncle Sam.
We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on. After Italy folded up...
That was Robert A. Heinlein as "Anson MacDonald" in "Solution Unsatisfactory," in the May 1941 Astounding. It even gets the principal events in the war in the right order.
"I found that remarkable," Teller said, describing how Manhattan Project physicists would sometimes talk at lunch about sf stories they had read. Someone had thought that Heinlein's ideas were uncannily accurate. Not in its details, of course, because he described not a bomb, but rather using radioactive dust as an ultimate weapon. Spread over a country, it could be decisive.
I recalled thinking in the 1950s that in a way Heinlein had been proved right. The fallout from nuclear bursts can kill many more than the blast. Luckily, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air bursts, which scooped up little topsoil and so yielded very low fallout. For hydrogen bombs, fallout is usually much more deadly.
In Heinlein's description of the strategic situation, Teller said, the physicists found a sobering warning. Ultimate weapons lead to a strategic standoff with no way back--a solution unsatisfactory. How to avoid this, and the whole general problem of nuclear weapons in the hands of brutal states, preoccupied the physicists laboring to make them. Nowhere in literature had anyone else confronted such a Faustian dilemma as directly, concretely.
Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline" provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos. It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its principal plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it? To the physicists from many countries clustered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a j
oint responsibility laid upon many nations.
Discussion of Cartmill's "Deadline" was significant. The story's detail was remarkable, its sentiments even moreso. Did this rather obscure story hint at what the American public really thought about such a super-weapon, or would think if they only knew?
Talk attracts attention. Teller recalled a security officer who took a decided interest, making notes, saying little. In retrospect, it was easy to see what a wartime intelligence monitor would make of the physicists' conversations. Who was this guy Cartmill, anyway? Where did he get these details? Who tipped him to the isotope separation problem? "And that is vhy Mr. Campbell received his visitors."
So the great, resonant legend of early hard sf was, in fact, triggered by the quiet, distant "fan" community among the scientists themselves. For me, closing the connection in this fundamental fable of the field completed my own quizzical thinking about the link between the science I practice, and the fiction I deploy in order to think about the larger implications of my work, and of others. Events tinged with fable have an odd quality, looping back on themselves to bring us messages more tangled and subtle than we sometimes guess.
I am sure that the writers of that era, and perhaps of this one as well, would be pleased to hear this footnote to history. Somebody really was listening out there. I suspect today is no different. Perhaps the sf writers are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of tomorrow.
An Introduction to Gregory Benford
by Peter Nicholls
Greg Benford is the sort of man you can (and do) meet anywhere. I was not at all surprised in 1997 to run into him unexpectedly while he was holding forth on the deck of the Queen Mary. As he talked with typical animation, in my mind's eye I saw the Greg Benford I had originally met almost a quarter of a century ago--I think it was 1976--and mentally superimposed the past image over the present one. Astonishingly, he had hardly changed at all from the youngish man I'd met while he was working in Cambridge, UK.
It's true the greying beard is a rather pepper-and-salt affair now, but he hasn't become overweight, and still looks youthful though he's in his late fifties-born 30 January 1941--and still holds a glass of something alcoholic as he gestures, while he talks nineteen to the dozen. His conversation is knowledgeable, argumentative and good-humoured. He's a good man to talk to (though he doesn't suffer fools gladly), and a good friend of mine, though I suppose we've only got together twenty or so times in three decades. In appearance, he looks intellectual but tough. He looks as if he might have been a sportsman once, maybe a football player, but he probably wasn't. (Footnote: Greg told me when he read the above that he gave up quarterbacking in Junior High, getting tired of being knocked down, but has suffered around ten broken bones from surfing, baseball etc.)
Most famously, of course, he has combined two complementary careers, academic physicist and science-fiction writer. (He must be the only writer in the world to have published both novels and scientific papers on the galactic centre: one of the novels is Furious Gulf, 1994, and one of the papers is "An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center", Astrophysical Journal, October 15th, 1988, pp 735-42.) But he was already active in science fiction long before either of these careers took off.
Benford has been a Californian for several decades now, but his childhood was in the Deep South, in Alabama, plus years spent in Japan and Germany because his army-officer father was posted there. Benford has a Texas connection too. An interview tells us "I have the weird distinction of having been an instigator of the first Con in Texas and the first Con in Germany." The Texas con was the Southwestern Con, July 1958. The German convention was even earlier, WetzCon (for Wetzlar, Hesse) in 1956. Not bad going for a teenager.
Like so many other sf writers, Benford began life in the science-fiction world as a fan, and rather a notable one. He was, for example, co-founder in 1955 of the celebrated fanzine Void with his identical twin James, at the age of fourteen; subsequent co-editors included Ted White and Terry Carr. (Carr's experience here stood him in good stead; he went on to win a 1959 Hugo for his later fanzine Fanac, co-edited with Ron Ellik, and later became a distinguished writer also, and editor of the Ace Specials.) By now Benford was moving westward, and he did his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Oklahoma, graduating in 1963.
Professional writing came quite a bit later than fan writing. His first published story was "Stand-In", 1965, written while he was a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. It won second prize in an amateur writing contest held by the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but he wrote little more before 1969.
Much of his early work, and some later, was written in collaboration. These stories and novels included some written with his brother Jim, with his sister-in-law Hilary, and most importantly with Gordon Eklund. There were later novels in which he collaborated with William Rotsler, and subsequently with David Brin.
His earlier novels were usually based on stories previously published, sometimes by reworking three or four of them and putting them together in mosaic style. In another writer this could be laziness, or a mean-minded attempt to wring every possible last nickel from previously published work. With Greg, I think the motivation is quite different. He gets dissatisfied, he wants to work out the implications of ideas more rigorously and deeply. Like a terrier with a bone, he shakes an idea and tosses it about and buries it, then digs it up again to worry it still further. Or, as Greg put it another way in an interview, "Ideas come to me in a lapidary way, layering over the years."
For example, his first novel was Deeper than the Darkness, published by Ace Books in 1970. It was based on a 1969 story, one of his earliest, and also called "Deeper than the Darkness". When he looked back on the book-length version later on he was dissatisfied, thought it "dreadful"; it was "hastily written". So he expanded and rewrote it into a more sophisticated version, The Stars in Shroud, 1978.
But I've just re-read the original novel, having remembered that it excited me at the time. Sure, there are infelicities, and the ending is ill-plotted and rushed, but it's still pretty good. It's obvious why I liked it: it came out in the middle of the rather phoney debate between "hard sf" on the one hand, and "New Wave sf" on the other, and with extraordinary dexterity it reconciles the warring factions. It's about both inner and outer space. It sees value in and uses the soft sciences sociology and psychology, but it also includes tachyons, gravity waves, and some rather nifty orbital calculations. The story is indescribable and rather ugly--telling the effects of an alien "plague" weapon on a human race, scattered through the galaxy, whose dominant mode of living is a form of collectivism based on oriental philosophies. The plague takes the form of its victims suffering acute agoraphobia, and burrowing into shit-lined tunnels where they lie cocooned, straight from the collective into stinking isolation, and ultimately die. It is a memorably telling image.
Before leaving this novel, I should refer Australian readers to the following: "…my father a truly rare specimen: one of the last pure Americans, born of the descendants of the few who had survived the Riot War. That placed me far down in the caste lots, even below Australians."
Deeper than the Darkness foreshadows Benford's later work in many respects: a love of anarchic individualism which is interpreted by some as a version of right-wing Californian libertarianism (though I'm pretty sure Greg wouldn't go along with that); a melding of psychological studies (linguistics, the nature of intelligence, the nature of sentience, the function of emotions) with hard physics (Benford's real-world specialty is plasma studies, especially as they relate to astrophysics, but he has worked in other areas of astrophysics as well); an extraordinary breadth of theme. He works on a broader canvas than almost any of his hard sf colleagues and with more colours on his palette.
Benford became well known quite quickly. After a couple of previous award nominations, he quickly won a Nebula in 1974 for a fine novelette he wrote with Gordon Eklund, "If the Stars are Gods". This was one of the four pie
ces that were woven together to make the collaborative novel of the same title, If the Stars are Gods (1977). This first-contact story tells of aliens in our solar system, who regard our Sun as a sentient being, and treat it as a god. It is one of the most interesting 1970s stories that use religious themes in sf. (It was around this stage of his career that I first met Greg, when he was a Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, in 1976.)
Benford won his second Nebula, this time for best novel, for the 1980 novel Timescape. It remains his best-known work, and has deservedly become a classic, but I think it has had an unfortunate side effect in somehow shadowing his subsequent career. Perhaps readers expected more of the same, which Greg was not really prepared to give them. Timescape is the definitive time-travel-through-tachyons story, and is set in the world of scientific research, a world that Greg of course knows intimately, and he makes vivid use of his insider knowledge. The plot involves a vital, panicky message sent by future scientists to present-day ones via tachyonic coding. The book was so powerful that one publishing house, Tor Books, named an entire sf line the Timescape line. Few novels become logos.
I had vaguely assumed that Benford had won Hugos as well as Nebulas, and it was only while researching this introduction that I found I was wrong. He has never won a Hugo in any category. Benford's absence is arguably the major omission in the list of Hugo winners over the last three decades. Among his fellow hard sf writers who have won Hugos in the same period are Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, David Brin, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, John Varley and Vernor Vinge. Naming no names, Benford surely writes as well as the best of these, and better than several of them. (Surprisingly few Hugo awards have gone to sf writers who use hard science, despite the mundane stereotype of the sf fan--the man or woman who votes for the Hugos--as typically a technonerd. This is, it occurs to me, a very significant datum.)
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