Amazon.com: Isn't the brouhaha simply a natural part of the cycle of knowledge? Any new practical scientific breakthrough is suspicious at first, just as test-tube babies were two decades ago.
Benford: That's true, but knowing that doesn't prevent people from indulging in the idiot wind that blows through this culture at hurricane force sometimes. Dolly was the biggest scientific story of last year, but opinion and emotion swamped the nature of the story itself. That kind of public emotion is what I addressed in this book.
Amazon.com: Why did you choose to set Cosm seven years in the future?
Benford: Because the experiment Alicia Butterworth does will actually be done then. The machine opens in two years, but they are going to slap gold together for about five years and then uranium is slated for around 2005. Everything in the book is as close to the way it will be as it can possibly get. The room numbers at Caltech are the right room numbers, and so forth. It's to serve my own sense of verisimilitude. In the afterword I note the deviations from the real world, but there are very few. I'm really writing a series of what I call scientific suspense novels. Artifact, a novel about Greek archeology I published over a decade ago, is a scientific suspense novel. Timescape and Cosm are, as well. They're less science fictional than stuff like Jurassic Park. When are they ever going to have a Jurassic Park? Well, I can tell you when this experiment is going to be done--in 2005!
Amazon.com: Speaking of Alicia, it's interesting that you created a protagonist who is rather on the outside looking in.
Benford: Yes--well, I have always been on the outside myself.
Amazon.com: In what way?
Benford: Well, I am from Alabama. My father was a career military officer in Japan, and that was where I stumbled upon science fiction, the standard estranged literature. I lived on the outpost of the American empire, in Japan and then in Germany, and that was a shaping experience. I went to the University of Oklahoma, not to an Ivy League school. I had to change my accent when I entered the academic world. I chose a black woman as the lead character because I wanted to do something different. Alicia can be irritating, she can be a bit odd, and she's allowed to, because she's a black woman. She's figured that out, and she uses it, which isn't good for her character. She is not a swell person, as you probably noticed. She says acerbic things, and she doesn't get along with people. But creative scientists are not like bank clerks. Society hardly gives them any latitude. Artists are expected to be strange, but scientists are expected to be like ordinary office workers--and they aren't.
Amazon.com: I loved the way you satirized that in the anecdote about the scientist who wanted to get married so he wouldn't have to have a social life. That rang very true.
Benford: Yes, and I even dropped in that old joke about the scientist who impulsively goes home with a gorgeous woman he meets in a bookstore, and then when he explains to his angry wife where he's been the last few hours, she says, "You're lying! You were in the lab!" I love writing about the social quirks of scientists. It's a mirror of the cultural problem. Scientists don't know how to speak to the public. The posthumous annunciation of Feynman is all about that. He was a charismatic figure--the best public speaker I ever saw, better than any politician--and now that he's dead, all his books are back in print. We're looking for that kind of identifiable scientific figure, because the guy in the lab is not making it in the popular culture. And we have lost all our advocates. Carl is dead. Isaac is dead. Who have we got?
Amazon.com: No more PR people.
Benford: We desperately need someone.
Amazon.com: It's interesting that Cosm has been picked up by Book-of-the-Month Club, which indicates that they see it as something that breaks out of genre.
Benford: I think so. Or perhaps that they've finally gotten rid of their reflex reaction to science fiction.
Amazon.com: It's a book that works on a lot of literary levels. There's the scientific suspense: what is this object, what is it going to do next? Then there's the commentary on the whole academic and political circus that surrounds it. And finally, there's a very convincing, non-cloying romance between two scientists whose work is everything to them.
Benford: Thank you. I worked a long time to try to write a short book with all of those things in it. There's a transaction between the guy and the gal and there's some physics and there's some plot advancement, all of it in one scene. It's not like most conventional literary novels, where one scene only does one job. Cold Mountain is a very well written book but it's mostly a sentence level book. Great paintings are not made up of beautiful brush strokes, but of aesthetic concepts. Brush strokes are necessary but not sufficient. That's true in novels, too.
Amazon.com: Do you ever imagine yourself turning to mainstream fiction?
Benford: My territory is the scientific subculture, and it's unexplored. Why should I try to do a novel of suburban romance, which everyone is doing, when I can write about a subculture that is more important to society? I think I'll stick to what I know. The conventional literary world has never understood the strength of the American genres. This is the culture that produced Broadway musicals, the hardboiled detective novel, ragtime, jazz, rock and roll, modern science fiction, modern fantasy, romance novels. That's what we are good at. The literary world thinks that isn't important, but history will not echo that judgment. The literary world doesn't understand American cultural vitality--it keeps producing these nostalgic novels about Americans. That's a deep problem in the literary world; it's the reason that the literary novel has itself become a genre. It has its own cover designs and marketing strategies, its own clearly defined audience--it's a genre, folks!
Amazon.com: What are you working on now?
Benford: I've finished my next book, Deep Time, which is nonfiction. After that I have a novel--the working title is Ultimata. It's a bit hard to explain, but it's about a black hole in our solar system. It's set in the near present. I've got a lot of work done on it, but I still have to figure out the characters. Although I never figure them out completely until I actually write them.
Amazon.com: Would you call it a companion to Cosm, the way Cosm is to Timescape?
Benford: That's right. It's another scientific suspense novel. This time I try to explicate the astronomical community, which I've worked in. They're ripe for interpretation because they're so different. The most actively creative parts of their lives are spent on mountaintops at night. The contrast between the human scale and scientific scale is at its most extreme in astronomy. Even now a mission to the outer solar system takes one entire scientific career. To formulate an idea, get it funded, build the spacecraft, launch it, get it there, get the results, and get it back is a career. We have reached the actual limit of the involvement of a single person. So the astronomical scale has a profound unspoken impact on astronomers.
Amazon.com: Do your colleagues look forward to appearing in your novels?
Benford: (laughs) I don't think so, but the reaction to Cosm has been positive by the people who are portrayed in it; there must be a dozen real people in there under their own names. Faulkner said that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of grandmothers-- in other words, art is more important than people's likes and dislikes. Of course, that's a classic example of artistic arrogance.
Amazon.com: How do you organize your mental energies between science, writing, and personal life?
Benford: I stay home and write on weekends. During the evenings I do the thinking, note-taking, things like that.
Amazon.com: You don't usually do book tours--is that because you've got a day job, so to speak?
Benford: Well, yes, but I've just never cared much about them. This one is different, more organized. If you go on National Public Radio's book review show, you have to go to Madison, Wisconsin. And that's effective. I hadn't really realized that until this trip. Tours used to be just a bunch of book signings, which are nice enough, but you just meet people you've already sold the book to. Other than getting your book on Opr
ah!® how do you reach a larger audience? Publishers really don't know. Well, now the smart bunnies try to get on Amazon.com.
Amazon.com: There's always Hollywood.
Benford: I've done a bunch of pitches in Hollywood in the last couple of weeks. I've met several directors who thought Cosm was a movie plot. I never realized that, but then, who would have thought My Dinner with Andre was a movie plot? So I was pitching it to these guys who were very heavy hitters, and they say they couldn't make it for less than $80 million.
Amazon.com: Gee, all they really need is some lab equipment and a big steel bowling ball.
Benford: But they don't want to save money! They want a big special effects finish, so they would redesign the whole back end of the story. The secret reason they're interested is that Lucas has the deep space epic locked up for the next three years, and no one wants to go up against him. So they're looking for special effects plots set on Earth in the near future, not the far future--just right out of his ballpark.
GREGORY BENFORD
ANTARCTICA AND MARS
Recently I was mulling over my favorite authors, and it struck me that often a writer's essential flavor can be summed up by one of his book titles. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Hemingway, In Our Time.
At least it's an amusing game. I picked The Stars My Destination for Alfred Bester, Star Maker for Olaf Stapledon, Childhood's End for Arthur C. Clarke. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest. Poul Anderson, Time and Stars.
Then I thought of that ceaseless advocate of the space program, Robert Heinlein. Surely his mood and attitude is captured by The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Space as gritty, huge, hard, real.
Which depressed me a bit, for today the space program's spirit is anything but that. A diffuse unreality pervades NASA. Similarly, James Gunn's definitive treatment of the radio search for intelligent life, The Listeners-- not a bad title choice for his essential theme, since Gunn is one of our best social critics -- now seems quite optimistic, since Congress recently killed the program (though the Planetary Society plans to carry on, using public donations). Were all these hopeful outlooks in sf simply naive?
I reflected back on my own involvement with space, from the freckled kid reading Willy Ley and Arthur Clarke describing how rockets worked, to a consultant for NASA and the Planetary Society. Somehow a lot of the zip has gone out of space for a lot of us, and for the public, too. Why?
We went wrong just after Apollo, I think. James Fletcher was NASA Administrator from 1971 to 1977, when the Shuttle was being proposed, designed and checked out -- or rather, not checked out. He convinced Congress that this nifty little reusable rocket-cum-space-plane gadget would get magically cheaper and cheaper to fly, eventually delivering payloads to orbit for a few hundred dollars a pound.
The cost now is over $5000 a pound, and still climbing as missions get delayed and services shrink. A twenty-fold increase, allowing for inflation. The Nixon administration bequeathed to us an econo-ride Shuttle (and Jimmy Carter signed the appropriations bill for it). They also axed the remaining Apollo missions and the 1970s version of the space station, though they weren't vital. Their killing the long-range research for a Mars mission had great effects, however, because we now have no infrastructure developed for large deep space missions.
Then came the Challenger disaster, with Fletcher in charge again. In the Challenger commission report he allowed as how "Congress has provided excellent oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of contributed to the accident." Except, of course, for consistent under-funding and pressure to attain goals set by people with little or no technical competence.
The shuttle is a spaceship designed by a committee of lawyers. "The fault was not with any single person or group but was NASA's fault," Fletcher went on, "and I include myself as a member of the NASA team." As Joe Haldeman sardonically remarked, "Most people would say he was more than just a member."
And we can't even buy shuttles in quantity. The Fletcher-Nixon vision saw a flight a week. That got scaled down to twenty-four a year, then twelve. In 1989 there were nine, in 1990 six, with that abysmal prospect, a flight every few months, apparently settling in as the normal routine.
Unmanned exploration was once the virtually unblemished, high-minded face of space. Now our failures accumulate. The wrong lens curvature of the Hubble telescope. The big antenna which won't deploy aboard Galileo as it limps toward Jupiter, years late; we could have sent it directly, on a Proton booster the Soviets offered us at bargain rates, but politics of the late 1980s ruled that out. The Titans that explode with billion-dollar packages aboard, the satellites which go awry.
And the Mars Observer, lost to unknown error or just bad luck. My personal guess at the time was that while a small chip manufacturer is now getting blamed, there is an interesting coincidence that we lost contact after the thruster tanks were being pressurized. Tanks have exploded on missions before-- remember Apollo 13 -- and in both cases they had been engineered to three times the expected design limits. The review panel fingered the same plausible culprit, but basically we will never know.
The repair of the Hubble Telescope lifted spirits a bit, but face facts: it was a repair job we should not have had to do at all. The Hubble mission was overloaded with tasks, and NASA ejected to do them all with One Big Shot -- a poor strategy when you're pushing the envelope in several different directions.
It wasn't always so. Both Voyager spacecraft -- remember them? --returned a very interesting bonus in mid-1993 -- a burst of low frequency electromagnetic radiation. We believe these emissions came from beyond the spacecraft, about a hundred astronomical units from the sun lan A.U. is the distance from the sun to your house). A big flare eruption on the sun had propagated past the spacecraft and the emissions came at a time when the fast-streaming particles, going about 100 km/sec, struck something about twenty or thirty A.U. further out. What?
Plasma physicists identified the emissions as probably waves radiated by those particles as they ploughed into the shock wave which separates our solar neighborhood from the true deep-space plasma that ranges between the stars. Thus the Voyagers may have sensed the boundary of our little solar comfort zone. Within a decade or so they will cross that standing transition, where the plasma density drops and true inter-stellar space begins, a "wall" more meaningful than the orbital radius of Pluto.
Voyager was a miracle. We caught the big brass ring on that one, beginning when an orbital specialist noted in 1963 that a Grand Tour could be won by looping a probe past several of the outer planets. The window for this orbital high wire act opens every 175 years, but the last time, when Thomas Jefferson was President, we missed the chance. In 1972, when astronauts still trod the moon, we decided to go for the launch window in 1977.
I don't think NASA could do that today. Hell, it couldn't even decide to not do it that quickly. In just five years during the 1970s NASA invented and developed nuclear-power batteries which are still running, sixteen years after launch. It assembled fail-safe computers, and electronics that withstood the proton sleet of Jupiter, where a human would die of an hour's exposure. Built to give us Jupiter and Saturn, they still forge outward after gliding past Uranus and Neptune as well.
Voyager is a legacy of the 1960s, a child of the hustling Space Age that wanted to do everything it could (and a few things it couldn't, like building a true space plane). The Voyagers keep sailing on just as they were, dutifully sending back reports to a society that has changed profoundly.
Nothing follows them. Sure, Galileo is bound for Jupiter, due to arrive in 1995, but there it stops. NASA passed up the Halley's comet mission, while other nations went. Nothing will go to Saturn for many years. The proposed Cassini probe which does finally reach Saturn, probably sometime in the next millennium, will drop a vessel named Huygens onto Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system and to me the most interesting place of all.
Titan has a surface pressure no
t much different from that in your living room. It is far colder, but its thick atmosphere holds the organic chemicals we know existed on the early Earth. Has some slow, cold chemistry been at work there, conjuring up life forms utterly different from our own? Impossible to say, for our only closeup look showed only the featureless upper cloud deck of a methane atmosphere.
The stretching out of missions is getting worse. Galileo was planned to get to Jupiter in 1985. Though cooperation between the US and the Russians keeps getting talked about, it still has not materialized in solid ways. The recent agreements to combine our operations with the Mir station are a good sign, and probably will work out. But it's still only a beginning.
Gorbachev in 1987-88 sounded much like Khrushchev, talking up space. George Bush in 1989 resembled Kennedy, setting a goal: a manned Mars landing by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing, 2019. Both leaders sounded the charge. Both countries yawned and changed the subject. Shortly afterward, they changed the leaders, too.
What's different? The game has changed. It isn't national rivalry any more, and probably won't be for quite a while.
Brace Murray, former director of the Jet Propulsion Lab and professor at CalTech, pointed out to me many of these curious analogies and features of the Space Age, but his most striking analogy reached even further back.
Once we had a distant, hostile goal, and men threw themselves at it, too: Antarctica. Early in this century, Scott and Amundsen raced for the south pole with whole nations cheering them on. The Edwardian Englishman who tried to impose his own methods died. The savvy Norwegian who adapted to the hostile continent came through smoothly.
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