Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford (born January 30, 1941) is a science fiction author and physicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

Benford has an identical twin brother, Jim Benford, with whom he has collaborated on science fiction stories and projects. Both got their start in science fiction fandom. Benford was the co-editor of the fanzine Void. His first professional sale was the story "Stand-In", which appeared in the June 1965 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 1969, he began writing a regular science column for Amazing Stories.

Gregory Benford tends to write hard science fiction which incorporates the research he is doing as a practical scientist. He has worked on several collaborations with authors including William Rotsler, David Brin and Gordon Eklund, but has really made a name for himself with the Galactic Center Saga beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.

His breakthrough novel may have been the time-travel classic Timescape (1980), which won the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A scientific procedural, the novel eventually loaned its title to a line of science fiction published by Pocket Books.

Benford has also served as an editor of numerous alternate history anthologies as well as collections of the Hugo Winners. In the late1990s, he wrote Foundation's Fear, one of an authorized sequel trilogy to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The other two books in the series were written by David Brin and Greg Bear. Other novels published in that period include several near-future science thrillers: Cosm (1998), The Martian Race (1999) and Eater (2000). Benford has been nominated for four Hugo Awards (for two short stories & two novellas) and 12 Nebula Awards (in all categories). He won the Nebula for his novel Timescape and the novelette "If the Stars Are Gods" (with Gordon Eklund).

In addition to establishing Benford's Law of Controversy, Gregory Benford has proposed a corollary to Clarke's third law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced," and claims to have created and written about the first computer virus in the late 1960s.

In 2004, Gregory Benford proposed that the harmful effects of global warming could be reduced by the construction of a rotating Fresnel lens 1000 kilometres across, floating in space at the Lagrangian point L1. According to Benford, this lens would diffuse the light from the Sun and reduce the solar energy reaching the Earth by approximately 0.5% to 1%. He estimated that this would cost around $10 billion.

Benford serves on the board of directors and the steering committee of the Mars Society.

Selected Bibliography

Galactic Center Saga

• In the Ocean of Night (1976)
• Across the Sea of Suns (1984)
• Great Sky River (1987)
• Tides of Light (1989)
• Furious Gulf (1994)
• Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

Jupiter Project

• Jupiter Project (1975)
• Against Infinity (1983)

Man-Kzin Wars (with Larry Niven)

• Man-Kzin Wars VI (1994)

Second Foundation

• Foundation's Fear (1997)

Non-fiction

• Habitats in Space (1998)
• Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1999)
• Skylife: Visions of Our Homes in Space (2000), with George Zebrowsk
• Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science (2000), with George Zebrowski
• Beyond Human: The New World of Cyborgs and Androids (2001)

Short Story Collections

• In Alien Flesh (1986)
• Matter's End (1990)
• Amazing Stories No 7 (1992), with J. R. Dunn and James Alan Gardner and Kim Mohan
• Worlds Vast and various' (1999)
• Immersion and other Short Novels (2002)
• Merlin (2004)

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