As it happens I recently re-read the classic works of many of the above writers including Benford (not Robinson and Vinge, but with the addition of James Blish from the USA, and Bob Shaw and Paul McAuley from the UK). I was researching hard sf, which I love, despite the reputation sf encyclopedia editors have for being New-Wave lit-loving aesthetes, who wouldn't know a Lagrange Point from a Punctuation Point.
I have to say that the results, perhaps because I'm getting old, were disappointing. Only three of the writers seemed as good or better on re-reading, and few of their books managed to renew the original sense of wonder I'd had when I first encountered them. The writers that most successfully survived this cranky, subjective examination were Larry Niven (a veteran), Paul J. McAuley (a younger writer) and Gregory Benford (two years younger than me). Re-reading Benford, I kept finding neat nuances and implications that I'd somehow missed first time through. It was an exciting voyage through Benford's weird but stimulating mind.
The Benford series I had just read again is the enormous Galactic Center series of six connected novels. It consists of, as a kind of prologue, In the Ocean of Night (1977), followed by the series proper: Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Great Sky River (1987), Tides of Light (1989), Furious Gulf (1994) and Sailing Bright Eternity (1995). It would take thousands of words to describe the cosmic sweep of these novels properly; they consist of a swirling sea of characters and ideas, bubbling with manic energy, serving as venue for a heady narrative of conflict between organic (mostly human) intelligences, and machine intelligences. But it goes a lot further than that. The nature of sentience and the nature of the universe are only two of the series' ambitious themes. Benford must be the pre-eminent inventor of aliens working in sf today, and he really thinks them through. They do not just come from the standard alien template. Go and read the books. You may, like me, find them even better the second time.
This series makes utterly clear that to call Greg Benford a hard sf writer is only to tell half the story. For one thing, he has read a great deal, and a lot of what he writes has resonant allusions to other writers. (Notably to William Faulkner. I always enjoy Benford's public controversies-there have been quite a few of them. But the Faulkner-homage scenario was the most enjoyable yet, with Greg receiving what looked like a knock-out uppercut from ace critic Gary Wolfe, only to bounce back off the canvas and bruise Wolfe with a series of well-judged left hooks.)
As he foreshadowed in Deeper than the Darkness, Benford has continued (particularly in the Galactic Center series) to balance outer space against inner space, biology against physics, history against information theory. If you think this sounds daunting, well, yes it is a bit. But it's entertaining, too, every now and then to read books that rigorously exercise the mind, rather than feeding it the usual fast-food snacks. This quality of Greg's writing, together with his sporadic willingness to take experimental risks with ordinary English-language prose, means that he has never been able to seduce what I call the Star Wars audience. But then, where would movies like Star Wars get their ideas from if it were not for the pioneer work of the Asimovs and Clarkes and Benfords and Bears? (No offence meant to movie fans here-I'm one myself.) No, Benford's secret, and from a certain point of view his failure, is that he writes for grown-ups.
This is a brief introduction, not a critical essay, so I'll not discuss all Greg's books, though I must at least mention a few. There are two good collections of short stories, the first being In Alien Flesh (1986) and the second being Matter's End (Bantam 1994, but the UK edition of 1996, Gollancz, has extra stories added.) Many stories, however, remain uncollected. There was much sometimes heated discussion of Benford's authorized sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, entitled Beyond the Fall of Night (1991), and of his recent contribution to Asimov's Foundation sequence, Foundation's Fear (1997), when they appeared. I haven't yet read his most recent novel, which is Cosm (1998), but it has had some great reviews.
It is a mystery to me how Greg finds the time for all this stuff. He does not generally seem stressed or tense when you meet him, and his relaxation can almost reach the point of leglessness, so to speak. He and I on one occasion in the 1980s got embarrassingly drunk, though this-for Greg at least-is atypical.
However, he obviously works very hard. In 1971 he became Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine. He became Associate Professor there in 1973, and has held this position ever since. This research post is a real and demanding job, not just a sinecure like Asimov's post at Boston University mainly was. He has also been an advisor both to NASA and to the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy. And he was rewarded for all this in 1995 with a Lord Foundation award, which is a seriously heavy distinction given to not many scientists.
He has published around 150 scientific papers, which is a lot, and in addition has produced many popular science articles for Amazing (1969-76, and some much later), Vertex (1973-75) and in the nineties for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. (However, quite a few of the more recent Benford columns--these have attitude, being simultaneously levelheaded and deliberately polemical--have been more about literary criticism than popular science.) It is perhaps odd, given this rich publishing history, that not until the end of 1998 did Benford's first non-fiction book appear. It is Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia.
Greg Benford is arguably the premier hard sf writer of our time-though Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Paul J. McAuley and Kim Stanley Robinson in their different ways are up there too--and he is amusing and interesting in person, too. Also approachable and friendly. Don't be frightened to talk to him. Chances are he will talk right back, and if he doesn't, well, no damage has been done. He will not be the sort of guest of honour that spends most of the time lurking in his or her hotel room. I like him a lot, and I think you will too.
BIO
Gregory Benford -- physicist, educator, author -- was born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941. In 1963, he received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and then attended the University of California, San Diego, where he received his Ph.D. in 1967. He spent the next four years at Lawrence (Calif.) Radiation Laboratory as both a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist.
Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.
He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA and the White House Council on Space Policy. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it.
In 1989 Benford was host and scriptwriter for the television series A Galactic Odyssey, which described modern physics and astronomy from the perspective of the evolution of the galaxy. The eight-part series was produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.
Benford is the author of over dozen novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Great Sky River, and Timescape. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature.
Many of his best known novels are part of a six-novel sequence beginning in the near future with In the Ocean of Night, and continuing on with Across the Sea of Suns. The series then leaps to the far future, at the center of our galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning with Great Sky River, and proceeding through Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and concluding with Sailing Bright Eternity. At the series' end the links to the earlier novels emerge, revealing a single unfolding tapestry against an immense background.
His television credits, in ad
dition to the series A Galactic Odyssey, include Japan 2000. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Eater, May 2000
Skylife : Space Habitats in Story
and Science (Editor), 2000
The Martian Race, 1999
Deep Time, 1999
Cosm, 1998
Matter's End, 1995
Sailing Bright Eternity, 1995
Furious Gulf, 1994
Chiller, 1992 (as Sterling Blake)
Tides of Light, 1989
Great Sky River, 1987
In Alien Flesh, 1986
A Darker Geometry, with Mark O. Martin
Heart of the Comet, 1986, with David Brin
Artifact, 1985
Across the Sea of Suns, 1984
Against Infinity, 1983
Timescape, 1980
Nebula Award, Campbell Award, Ditmar Award, British SF Award
Shiva Descending, 1980, with Wm. Rotsler
Find the Changeling, 1980, with Gordon Eklund
In the Ocean of Night, 1977
If the Stars are Gods, 1977, with Gordon Eklund
Nebula Award
Jupiter Project, 1975
Deeper Than the Darkness, 1970 (retitled in 1978, The Stars in Shroud)
SELFNESS
By Gregory Benford
I am a clone.
Or rather, I am better than one. Or so any identical twin surely must see the matter.
The recent media feeding frenzy about a cloned sheep, Dolly, showed us journalism in its fullest modern form. Many of those writing about this genuine watershed moment in techno-culture followed current journalist practice: their foremost research instrument was the telephone. Of those who called me--an unlikely authority, since I am not a biologist--none realized that DNA does not solely determine the heritage a child gets from its parents.
My brother, Jim, and I shared a womb without a view for nine months. (Though not always restfully, our mother reports.) Genetically identical, we also enjoyed the same currents and chemicals of our mother. After a rather traumatic birth--both had our appendixes removed within days--we were brought up in the same house, with constant attentive parents, and even wore matching clothes until our late teens. (How much trauma this clothing ritual induced in our personalities I leave to others to decide; suffice to say that being seen as sugary-cute has left me with a decided prejudice against sweets in any form.)
True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true, in my case. We are distantly dismissive of mere fraternal twins (different DNA) and regard all others as "singletons," those condemned by birth to endure the isolation of never truly sharing the intuitive grasp that we enjoy without paying a price.
Or nearly so. There is mild statistical evidence that identicals have slightly lower IQ. This might be plausibly so; the comfort of ready communication may well lead to a certain mental laziness.
Jim and I felt the opposite. Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers, and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance. We attended a one- room schoolhouse, with each row of seats a separate grade. Against this my brother and I united, reading widely and enjoying the clash of cultures which paraded by. After we were 9 our father became a career Army officer, whisking us to Japan for three years, Germany for another three, and further isolating the twins from a continuity that might have sucked us into the conventional.
So we are an odd pair even among twins. Jim got his doctorate from the same institution as I, UC San Diego, in the same area (plasma physics) and now lives a few kilometers from where I once lived, in northern California. Such correlations appear often among twins. We grow up in a culture of sameness, so have a sense of self always shared.
Among singletons, interest in twins is enduring. Do we feel some mystical sense of connection? Of course; but whether it is mystical or not begs description. I am writing this at 35,000 feet over Greenland, on the way back to UC Irvine from Lapland. I know without thinking about it that my brother is probably body surfing on a beach near La Jolla, though I have not spoken to him for ten days. I remember his itinerary and without conscious deliberation feel where he is likely to be. This is processing at the unconscious level, and as an experiment, when I see him in two days I shall check with him and let you know the outcome. [Later: my estimate was right to within the hour.]
But this is scarcely mystical. Instead, I attribute the innumerable similar incidents in our lives to a lot of automatic thinking, based on intuitions cooked up through more than five decades. To singletons this can look uncanny.
Speaking as a twin, clones seem a lesser form. They grow up in a later era than their genetic duplicates, with different upbringings. Would knowing that they were genetic duplicates trouble them? Surely such people would not be inherently more mentally fragile; Siamese twins are far more like each other than ordinary twins, yet suffer no higher incidence of mental illness than is usual, suggesting that even extreme parallels in nature and nurturer are not damaging.
The furor over Dolly puzzled me by the emotional level of debate. Reasonable people like political commentator George Will asked, "What if the great given--a human being is a product of the union of a man and a woman--is no longer a given?" This issue properly comes from a broader issue in biotechnology, the entire field of artificial birth in all forms, for there are no precise boundaries in this new territory.
Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child, if they wish. Beyond such emotionally wrenching cases, where should we erect walls? Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins asserted that he could see purely intellectual issues intriguing enough to justify cloning himself: "I think it would be mind-boggingly fascinating to watch a younger edition of myself growing up in the twenty-first century instead of the 1940s."
Many no doubt find his position puzzling or even immoral or disgusting. Even so, why should Dawkins be prevented from having a cloned child? What is society's mandate?
The Dolly debate produced several claims that cloning violated the fundamental principle of individual dignity. Twins certainly belie that argument. Fears of interchangeable people armies, usually marching robotically onward, come from a simple-minded genetic determinism. And the grounds for a principle of uniqueness seem vague at best.
After all, why treat clones differently?--we twins and clones are all "monozygotes", as the biologists put it. In fact, clones necessarily separate in outside influences from their first moments in the womb, for the wombs are different. Another's DNA inserted into a host egg will acquire "maternal factors" from the proteins of that egg, affecting later development. The womb's complex chemical mix varies with each mother, so nine months of different "weather" will change the outcome in the fetus; the baby will not be a photocopy of its older original.
And clones will be full-fledged people with all rights attendant to that status. Nobody forces twins to serve as organ farms for their other twin; clones would have the same legal status.
The true first use of cloning will undoubtedly be in the "copying" of highly selected farm animals. These could first be excellent milk cows or racing horses. More futuristically, we shall see--and quite soon-- the cloning of "pharm" animals which yield biotech products of use to us, such as insulin-rich milk from cows, and a whole array of therapeutic hormones, enzymes and proteins.
Plants have already been extensively engineered. More than three-quarters of the cotton grown in Alabama last year was genetically tuned to kill predatory insects. Already scientists are experimenting with cotton plants that contain polyester fibers, too, surely a boon for fans of leisure suits.
Still, cloning should indeed furrow the brow of long- perspective thinkers. We believe sexual reproduction holds sway over much of the kingd
om of life because it provides ever-new gene mixes, allowing a species to build fresh defenses against the ever-mutating pathogens that infest the natural world. The perpetual arms race between prey and predator favors sex as a defense. Seen this way, we are men and women because the primary predator on humans have always been microbes, not tigers.
So "pharm" animals cloned over and over will face the very real threat of infectious diseases which wipe out a herd overnight. But surely nobody will clone huge numbers of humans, so such plagues will be quite unlikely. The breeds of influenza that regularly attack us genetically diverse humans will do far more damage.
As I write this, a presidential panel seems about to recommend a uniform federal ban on human cloning experiments. I believe this will be a mistake, generally, and an ineffective move anyway. The technology is fairly simple; others will pick it up. In Latin American countries or on offshore islands, clinics will offer the service at a hefty charge. Underground, without legal oversight, we will indeed see some tragedies and even horrors.
Bioethics is a field with many practitioners but few obviously qualified savants. Often the bans which spring from such federal committees prove ill-advised, their only long-term effects negative. This was the case with the two-year moratorium on recombinant DNA, which simply slowed the field without deciding anything. So did similar bans on selling organs or blood, and I predict, so shall the recent Clinton prohibition on using human embryos in federally backed medical research. The ultimate price for these momentary interruptions -- and so far they have always been momentary -- is lives lost because the resultant technology arrives too late for some patients.
Bioethicists tend to see problems everywhere, and saying no gives them visible power. Letting technology evolve willy-nilly, responding to what people want -- maybe even people without advanced degrees! -- gives bioethicists no perks or prominence; unsurprising, then, that they seldom go that route. They aren't the patients clinging to life, or infertile, or stunted in some potentially fixable way.
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