Gregory Benford 2009 Interview
Gregory Benford is nominated for his novella “Dark Heaven.”
What attracted you to science in general, whether it’s your career as a physicist or as an author?
I got interested in science fiction at an early age, because it’s the literature of ideas. I always think, “Gee, that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s like to do it.” I do that with essentially everything. I don’t watch sports, I play sports. I can’t resist going into fields that are of interest to me, so I’ve worked in biology, physics, astrophysics, environmental science, geoengineering. Being a science-fiction fan is a great way to get deeply into the culture, to understand where ideas come from, and what kinds of people have ideas. Most scientists aren’t like that, because most scientists do fairly well-defined research that isn’t idea-intensive. I like idea-thick subjects. Most scientists have read science fiction. Isaac Asimov said to me once that by his informal questioning, the majority of all scientists read science fiction when they were young, and after graduate school, if they read anything, it’s usually science fiction, but most of them don’t read anything after graduate school!
How has your career in one field aided you in the other? Which came first, the desire to be a writer or that of a physicist, or both?
They came together. Science fiction is deeply wrapped up in the doing of science. Science and its handmaiden, technology, dominate modern times. I realized that nobody wrote about the scientific mindscape, the way we think, how scientists interact with the rest of the culture. There was a huge, pregnant possibility, and I could write about it because I came out of it. The literary mandarins are virtually unanimous in their fear of science and technology, which undermines conventional world views, and always will. It’s the inherent revolutionary culture. Science fiction at its best is part of the undying revolution we call modern times. I felt this strongly, and sold my first story, written during a boring statistical mechanics lecture, in graduate school.
How did you get involved with the Mars Society? What is it that you do as part of the board of directors?
I was a founding director because I felt that the most important thing to do in the entire space program is to find out if there’s life on Mars. Did life begin there, then colonize the Earth? If it persists still, how different is it? If we find something really fundamental on Mars, exobiology will explode.
In your opinion has your writing improved compared to when you first started out?
I hope it has! The restless urge to write beset me early on, and still does…
You’re in a good position to comment on both the scientific and science fiction community. What’s the biggest change you’ve witnessed in both fields? Did this have any effect on you as a physicist/writer?
Science is loosening up. Nature runs an sf one pager each week. Cosmology is getting usefully more speculative. The culture grows more lively. I’ve branched out into human longevity, founding two biotech companies to advance our healthspan. I’m publishing papers on averting global climate change by geoengineering, both by reflecting sunlight and capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Science has to be more venturesome because the future is coming at us faster than ever.
I saw all this as I began heading down the straight, academic, professorial track, but had this other life, as a writer. I felt it was natural to do both things. But I had to do it. I’ve never seen the point in not doing what you want to. Most academics are content to be conventional—it’s safer. I didn’t fit that mold. You always pay a price. At faculty meetings considering my promotions, people asked how much money I made from writing. A lot of people are unwilling to admit that they’re motivated by envy, but we all know that many are.
Which are you more comfortable with, writing short stories or novels? What do you think is the advantage of each when it come to science fiction?
Short stories are a pleasant vice, most enjoyable. Novels have more weight and longevity. But I write for fun – even poetry! – so that matters little.
How does it feel to have created the Benford Law of Controversy?
That surprised me – a line taken from my novel, Timescape. There are a half dozen others have derived from my work, but I don’t state them as laws.
What projects are you currently working on?
Mostly running my biotech companies, whose focus is increased human healthspan – so we can see the futures we imagined!
For those unfamiliar with your work, what books or stories of yours would you recommend?
Timescape, Eater, Cosm, Artifact – all novels about scientists doing science – and The Martian Race, about astronauts doing science on the ground. Timescape’s popularity is somewhat mysterious to me. I finished it thinking, I’ve finally written the novel that completely indulges my pleasure in being able to write about my own experience. It’s sure to be a failure, I reasoned. It’s often said that review articles in a given field of science are actually forms of concealed autobiography. That’s also true of novels. There’s so much autobiography in Timescape! I appear as several different characters. Gregory Markham is me, and the two unidentified twins in graduate school at UCSD in 1962-63 are obviously me and Jim. It’s about going to graduate school, being an assistant professor, and being a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, all of which I’ve done. I wrapped it around this plot that’s always obsessed me, the sense of missed possibilities in our lives. Nobody regrets on the death bed the things they did, but rather the things they didn’t do. To echo Jackson Brown: “Although the future is there for anyone to change, sometimes it seems it would be easier somehow to change the past.” I suppose I wedded a deep emotion to a deep facet of physics.
My first thoughts about Timescape were: Is time travel possible? You have to have the right physics. Is there any physics around today that might make it happen? Maybe tachyons. Suppose I was a real scientist—wait, I am a real scientist! What would I do first? Build some kind of phone booth that you walk into, and it turns you into tachyons and transports you? That sounds appetizing. Why don’t we test these ideas by sending a couple of tachyons into the past to see if we can convey some information? My first notes said, time telegraph? I want to send a signal to the past, and that’s actually enough. My God, if you do that, wow! Marconi wanted to send signals to other people; he didn’t want to transport human beings through radio waves. It was the investigation of how I would do it, what would be the first step. That led me through the logic to build the novel. I never got around to the phone booth that transmits people into the past. Bill and Ted did that, eventually.
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science.In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His 1999 analysis of what endures, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, has been widely read. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in both astrophysics and plasma physics and biotech. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.
Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays..
