Today is Gregory Benford’s birthday.
Born Jan. 30, 1941, Benford is 85. We not only wish a happy birthday but also our best wishes for health and happiness to Benford, who suffered a stroke a few years ago.
Known for his hard science fiction informed by his career as an astrophysicist and physics professor, Benford is a Campbell and two-time Nebula winner and a Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
A COMMITMENT TO SCIENCE AND REASON
A Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Irvine, Benford is widely respected for writing science fiction that incorporates the research he’s done as a practical scientist.
For instance, Benford wrote the first story about a computer virus (based on a real computer virus he had spread. The story “The Scarred Man” was written in 1969 published in 1970.
The novel that put Benford on the map as a widely recognized as a topnotch sf author was Timescape (1980), a bestselling and award-winning time-travel novel – which eventually lent its title to a line of science fiction published by Pocket Books.
Benford became known for his law of controversy, quoted in a peer-reviewed social science journal, based on an adage from Timescape: “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”
A MASTER OF HARD SF
A four-time Hugo Award nominee and 13-time Nebula Award nominee, Benford was the guest of honor at Aussiecon Three, the 999 Worldcon.
His ambitious Galactic Center Saga, an example of hard sci-fi at its best, includes the novels In the Ocean of Night (1977), Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Great Sky River (1987), Tides of Light (1989), Furious Gulf (1994) and Sailing Bright Eternity (1996.)
His Jupiter Projects novels include Jupiter Project and Against Infinity, a 1983 Nebula Award nominee.
Benford wrote Foundation’s Fear, an authorized sequel to Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series with a focus on the Second Foundation.
Among his other novels: Cosm, Eater, Beyond Infinity, Beyond the Fall of Night, The Berlin Project, Rewrite: Loops in the Timescale (a “thematic sequel” to Timescape) and Shadows of Eternity.
BENFORD AND NIVEN’S BOWL OF HEAVEN TRILOGY
Benford’s imagination and epic scope is on impressive display in the linked novels Bowl of Heaven, Shipstar and Glorious, co-written with Prometheus winner Larry Niven.
Perhaps indirectly inspired in part by Niven’s landmark Ringworld novel and its sequels, the Benford-Niven collaboration in some ways tops Ringworld’s vast architecture in imagining an astonishlingy immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure half-englobing a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths.
Discovered by a human colony starship heading to the same potentially habitable solar system, the artifact is home to many alien species with many dangerous environments to explore.
Like the best of Benford, the trilogy – which I’ve recently enjoyed reading – centers on cosmic mysteries that invite us to expand our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe.
BENFORD’S PROMETHEUS NOMINEES
A three-time Prometheus Award nominee, Benford was a Best Novel finalist in 2000 for The Martian Race.
The novel imagines a competitive free-market race to successfully land a human-occupied spaceship on Mars, with a $30 billion dollar prize award to the first private organization or company that does so.
He also was nominated for Best Novel in 1984 for Against Infinity and in 1985 for Across the Sea of Suns.
While these Prometheus nominees incorporated enough pro-freedom, pro-free-market and political themes incorporated into their well-written tales to be deserving of such recognition, Benford’s predominant focus throughout his illustrious writing career has been on science and technology rather than political philosophy.
That’s probably a factor explaining why even though he’s a libertarian, Benford hasn’t won a Prometheus Award. (Of course, our award is based on the text of the work, not the private views of its author.)
Whatever their focus, Benford’s novels remain worth reading, whether by lovers of hard sf or lovers of liberty – and its fruits in science, reason, technology and progress.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
