Window on a Universe

As a science fiction writer, Gregory Benford is in a unique position. His work as a research physicist and physics professor at the University of California at Irvine doubles as research for his novels, which are notable for the clarity of their explanation of cutting-edge physics and for their precision of detail. His latest novel, Cosm, recounts a young physicist's accidental creation of a wormhole--an object in space-time that allows her to watch, as through a miniature window, the entire life cycle of a new universe. Benford spoke with Amazon.com's Barrie Trinkle and Bonnie Bouman, who began by asking him whether science or science fiction was his first love.

Gregory Benford: Both. (laughs) I was always fascinated by science, in part because I read science fiction. Science fiction is the literature of the voiceless minority in our culture that actually drives the future. And yet this [scientific] culture really is a separate culture. It has no poet laureates, no balladeers--it's largely unknown to the public, because scientists don't write about themselves. And the outsiders can't really understand the tribal ways. Like Margaret Mead in Samoa: she thought she got it right, but there was a lot she got wrong. And if that was possible in Samoa, it's certainly possible in the scientific community, which has a lot of rather subtle shrugs and grunts--methods of communicating that most people don't understand.

Amazon.co.uk: You explore the misunderstanding of science and scientists in Cosm.

Benford: Yes. It's really about the clash between the individual experience of science and the increasing public experience of science, now that there is so much attention from the media at every stage. If you hit on something important in science, it ceases to be your experience. It becomes a communal experience in fast forward.

Amazon.co.uk: Did you have any real-life scientific event in mind?

Benford:

Amazon.co.uk: 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.co.uk: 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.

Amazon.co.uk: 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.co.uk: 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.co.uk: I loved the way you satirised 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.co.uk: No more PR people.

Benford: We desperately need someone.

Amazon.co.uk: 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.co.uk: 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.co.uk: 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 judgement. 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.co.uk: What are you working on now?

Benford: I've finished my next book, Deep Time , which is non-fiction. 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.co.uk: 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.co.uk: 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.co.uk: How do you organise 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.co.uk: 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 realised 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 Oprah! ® how do you reach a larger audience? Publishers really don't know. Well, now the smart bunnies try to get on Amazon.com.

Amazon.co.uk: 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 realised 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.co.uk: 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.