The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  Beyond a light-year, Sirius outshines the Sun. Anything living there will point its concentrators at Sirius rather than at the Sun. But they can still evolve, survive.

  “Quite the numbersmith you’ve proved to be, Erma. So we’ll both be rich…”

  Though it is difficult to see what I can do with money. Buy some of the stim-software I’ve been hearing about, perhaps.

  “Uh, what’s that?” She was almost afraid to ask. Had Erma been watching while she used her vibrator…?

  It provides abstract patterning of imaginative range. Simulates neuro programs of what we imagine it is like to experience pleasure.

  “How’s code feel Earthly delights?”

  I gather evolution invented pleasure to make you repeat acts. Reproduction, for example. It’s essential message is, Do that again.

  “You sure take all the magic out of it, Erma.”

  Magic is a human craft.

  Claire let out a satisfied sigh. So now she and Erma had an entirely new life form to explore, understand, use… A whole new future for them…

  She looked around at winking lights, heard the wheezing air system, watched the med bot tend to her wrecked body…and sighed deep and long.

  For this moment, she could let that future take care of itself. She was happy to be back in the ugly oblong contraption she called home. With Erma. A pleasure, certainly.

  Afterword

  There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  —T. S. Eliot

  I grew up among working class folk in the deep South, who spun out yarns like talkative, web-building spiders. I have lived into an era when people sit before computers and receive pictures, texts, flatscreen truths.

  My southern roots probably figure in how I see the abiding flow of narrative. That was augmented by the sudden swerve my life took in 1949, when our father left his high school teaching position and accepted an offer to rejoin the Army, after having fought in WWII. Three years living in Tokyo, three in occupied Germany, then Texas high school…I and my identical twin brother got used to engaging new cultures, learning new languages. We moved often and somehow reading about promising, exotic futures seemed to help us. It seemed natural to us to favor science fiction, leading us to become physicists in the sunshine technopolis of California, where we remain.

  For me, a certain tautness comes in a science fiction tale that grasps at the sheer size of our conceptual worlds. Stories rich in ideas should not necessarily be primarily packages for psychological insights, though they can contain them. Similarly, no passing, abstract wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, for flow. Absolute freedom dwells immaculate and uncertain on the blank page, and our immense privilege is to use it. So sultry sliding sex and dread death are riddles for the thinking, sensual animal, afoot in a wild world we inherit from times immemorial, and so vast we are only now learning the universe’s true scale.

  An artist of whatever type brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, our central challenge: to make the world anew. Fiction is an essential exercise humans do—some call it creative lying—when they want to think in a larger scale. The fiction I like makes one think forward. It can devise thought experiments beyond the real and into the possible. (Nonfiction—what kind of genre name is that?—a negation, defined by what it does not do. I can think of no more striking defense of the imagination.) All this, while knowing that we are animated dust condemned to know we are dust, and mortal.

  In these tales I sought to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion. Along the way, it helps to treat the real world with respect. Reality is infinitely fine, and opinions seem somehow coarser than the texture of the real thing. So I try to write compact tales that ride on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. Getting that right in the science fictional dream factory is a major part of a writer’s charm arsenal.

  I’ve always written within the science fiction field, though I have also done a lot of nonfiction. A genre shapes thought, leading you to ideas, shapes, actions you might not have blundered upon had you worked in some shapeless field. Surely this reflects how our minds work, the cartography of our primate, storytelling evolution.

  The stories in this volume contain those that seem to me and my steady scrutineer, David Hartwell, to be perhaps my best, from about 215 stories. It’s been fun doing, too. I am by now well into my anecdotage, when the past swims back into view, blurred by time, and yet sharpens as you approach it, rereading stories once written fast and swift and sure.

  After you’ve read them, you may find interesting some comments on why and how I wrote them. I’ve grouped them below, sometimes under several categories, to illuminate how they seem in the rearview mirror.

  White Creatures, In Alien Flesh, Exposures, Mozart on Morphine, Time’s Rub, Dark Sanctuary, A Desperate Calculus, Zoomers, Anomalies, Matter’s End, Twenty-Two Centimeters, Bow Shock, Applied Mathematical Theology, Reasons Not to Publish, Penumbra, Gravity’s Whispers, The Sigma Structure Symphony

  For those whose life gets spent in biochemistry or in building houses, in research or in product sales—in these all, the brain tips a certain way. It’s terribly hard for specialists to convey the right nuance, to convey the heft and thrill of what they do. But a scientist’s experience I do know, so some of my fiction tries to convey my own work—and by inference, that of others in somewhat aligned professions. Part of this effort comes from my sense of a thinness in contemporary fiction, an attempt to finesse what is central to being human—work. As well, much fiction is skimpy about the way the world operates. Yet we know it mostly through how people experience it, not through its distant consequences. (Imagine a war story about a cartographer, instead of from the view of the grunt who has to scale a hill under heavy fire. These are very different tales.)

  Of course, science is a narrative, too, always provisional and moving. I try to convey it with a minimum of scientific detail, but often a scientist’s attitudes are embedded in the way science looks at our world. The same is true of, say, detectives or painters—you can’t get at their styles without showing the concepts that weave through their working worlds.

  The universe science reveals to us is farcically unrelated to what our primitive senses report. So I attempted in these stories to show how a scientist, or at least a rational thinker, approaches the unknown, viewing it through narrow windows. In “Bow Shock” I used my long history working in radio astronomy, especially observing astrophysical jets on the Very Large Array in New Mexico. (The radio maps in it are actual maps of runaway neutron stars.) “Exposures” drew on my optical observing at UCSC’s Lick Observatory and the Los Campanas Observatory in Chile. (Written in 1980, its technology is that of the era. The mysteries of the four jets seem to be resolved; see http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/585/1/281/pdf/0004-637X_585_1_281.pdf These authors conclude that the jets represent the captured remains of a disrupted dwarf galaxy that passed through the inner few thousand light years of NGC 1097’s disk.)

  Unique tensions work through the lives of scientists, as they move from their day jobs of heady arabesques and hard technology, into their after-hours domestic swarm. Such contrasts are little remarked upon in literature. This is a powerful stress, reminding us that David Hume enjoined, “Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.”

  In many of these stories I drew on my early career as a mathematical physicist. “Time’s Rub” frames a mathematical oddity, Newcomb’s paradox. I knew Bill Newcomb well and published several papers with him. His paradox bothered me for decades. I finally solved it with a friend, David Wolpert, using formal mathematics (in the journal Synthese http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.1343). “Time’s Rub” uses the paradox for a meditation on meaning, as do “Exposures,” “Mozart on Morphine,” and others. (Oddly, I have seldom used my two-decade experience running the High Energy Density plasma lab at UCI.)

>   When the world’s best science journal, Nature, began running stories of 800 words or less, they asked me to write some. I’ve included several here. They’re fun; have an idea, write it in one sitting, usually with a scientist character. Brevity is appealing; I wrote the following one for Wired, which wanted a story in ten words or less:

  She opened the newspaper to find: Sic Transit Gloria Monday.

  “Matter’s End” is another of my looks at life as a physicist, with every scientific detail taken directly from the world. The moist mysteries of its besieged India are from life, too—a long visit I paid there to attend an International Astronomical Society meeting—but augmented by some thoughts about how biotech is going to affect the developing world. Its philosophical basis is a mixture of the “implicate order” theories of quantum mechanics and Platonist ideas about the nature of knowing. These are not my views amid such surreal spires, mind, as a working physicist—but they do serve the cause of the story, so I used them.

  Stories reflect their times. For example, I wrote “Dark Sanctuary” in 1979, when the whole Fermi question was a hot topic and we’d come to realize that the O’Neill colony ideas of that era implied that people might well live in space indefinitely. I just put the two together.

  “The Sigma Structure Symphony” is the latest in a string of stories about a librarian in a SETI library centuries from now. I started these about a decade ago as a way to think about communication with alien minds through the knothole of electromagnetic messages, which will probably be how humanity does it (if ever). Of course, we may create strange minds through Artificial Intelligence, too—so I merged these ideas in the story sequence, which will become a novel in a few more years.

  In depicting scientists, authorial invisibility is a pose. The proper pose may be the Homeric bard’s one—he is there, but unimportantly there. I tried to do the same. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground,” John Updike said. He was a supremely literate man. A science fiction writer must include his ideas, dreams, nightmares—which are indeed his or hers, as much a part of life as Updike’s closely observed small town world. In science, ideas have as much presence as people, sometimes more.

  Calculus Of Desperation, Doing Lennon, Redeemer, Freezeframe, Zoomers, The Voice, Comes the Evolution, A Life with a Semisent, Penumbra, Mercies, Eagle

  In science fiction, a good idea is one that makes good scenes. Sometimes this means a Big Idea, most times not. Imagination is a rude friend, a largely uncontrollable spirit with more animal gusto than manners, who maybe gets out a bit too much. But a writer who is afraid to follow where his craft takes him is as useless as a politician who can’t afford to be wrong.

  Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our lone world. Either we manage our own numbers, mostly by upgrading the status of women (a wonderful solution) and so avoid a collision of those lines on civilization’s Grand Graph—or nature will do it for us.

  All short stories are strategies. Working in a confined space, one must render the essentials and get off the stage with a minimum of fuss. So I took the material for a thriller novel and compressed it into “A Calculus of Desperation,” perhaps the most alienating story in the book. Again I sought to get all the ideas of a more worked-out narrative into a small compass, to heighten impact.

  “Zoomers” is similarly tongue-in-cheek, trying to see how work might look in a few decades. We spend so much of our time, energy and psychic currency on labor, yet seldom does it figure in most fiction.

  “Doing Lennon,” “Redeemer,” “A Desperate Calculus” and “Nobody Lives on Burton Street” all emerge from possible futures that imply varying degrees of social stress. I enjoyed writing them, and “Nobody Lives on Burton Street” is one of my first stories; some of its methods seem to have been subtly used since in riot control. Kingsley Amis felicitously termed such stories “comic infernos” or “new maps of hell.”

  In “The Voice” I wanted to reflect on familiar terrors of intellectuals— a future where literacy is a vice, and much follows from it. Homages to Asimov and Bradbury abound.

  In Alien Flesh, Dark Sanctuary, Exposures, Proselytes, World Vast, World Various, Twenty-Two Centimeters, A Dance to Strange Musics, Backscatter

  Years ago David Hartwell used the term “transcendental adventure,” which may be a good way to describe depicting aliens. For me, the unexamined alien is not worth meeting. Yet the most compelling aspect of aliens is their fundamental unknowability. The best signifier for this, I think, is language. In Ian Watson’s fine novel The Embedding, aliens come to barter with us for our languages, not our science and art, because these are the keys to a deeper sensing of the world. Each species’ language gives a partial picture of reality. Conveying that within a narrative is a challenge not faced by any other form of literature I know, except perhaps the theological.

  The technical problem a writer faces in depicting alien languages is how to convey any information and yet be convincingly strange. If it’s just gibberish, you gain nothing and look funny, too. Broken English won’t do, and the usual sf cliche of awkward frog-speak is boring.

  I don’t have any theoretical solution to this problem, just some particular attempts, played out in stories. A genuinely alien encounter overlaps as well with the core of the scientific experience. No one coming into the 20th Century anticipated the conceptual leaps of relativity or quantum mechanics, and there are deep puzzles within those fields, still. In a way, rendering the alien is the Holy Grail of sf, because if your attempt can be accurately summarized, you know you’ve failed. No doubt the reality will be far stranger than we can imagine. Conveying the essential strangeness is a matter for artistry, not explanation—effing the ineffible.

  Perhaps my strangest story of all is “A Dance to Strange Musics.” It is a compressed novel, omitting the customary touches which might make the crew of a starship more easy to identify with. Instead I play with a landscape shaped by forces that work largely behind the scenes on Earth. We live between the plates of two immense spherical capacitors, the ground and the ionosphere, so absent more powerful resources, electrodynamics could drive our world. I renounced any detail or nuance about the characters themselves. Traditionally sf contrasts the human scale and its comforts with the alien, but in this story I omitted homey human detail, showing people in a drama we cannot even in principle fathom. Hard-nosed, yes, and that’s the point.

  “World Vast, World Various” is from a 1992 collaboration, Murasaki—stories set on an alien world designed by Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson. It’s a truly different planet, with three sentient species.

  Other stories in this group are jests, problem-solvings, or other approaches. Focusing on the alien quality of our universe gets at an essential that human culture seldom confronts. “Backscatter” is one of three stories about the same character, and there may be more such.

  Others of my anthologies hold many more of my 215 or so stories: In Alien Flesh (1986), Matter’s End (1995), Worlds Vast and Various (2000), Immersion and Other Short Novels (2002) and Anomalies (2012).

  I enjoy short stories because they yield the core experiments of our genre. Often, ideas emerge in them first, then migrate and expand into novels. They are the pulse of our field—and fun to write, too.