Gregory Benford: "White Creatures"

Gregory Benford
"White Creatures"
a short story
from The Best of Gregory Benford

The story begins:  

The aliens strap him in.  He cannot feel the bindings, but he knows they must be there; he cannot move.  Or perhaps it is the drug.   They must have given him something because his world is blurred, spongy.   The white creatures are flowing shapes in watery light.  He feels numb. the white creatures are moving about him, making high chittering noises. 

This appears to be an alien abduction story.   However, it isn't as straightforward as that.  The story has two narratives: one is of Merritt's experiences as a prisoner of the aliens and the second, of his memories that one would expect may explain what caused or led to his abduction.

When the second narrative begins we learn that Merritt is on Puerto Rico and is a technician involved with a seti project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), probably at the Arecibo Observatory, although I don't remember it being mentioned in the story. 

While the two narratives alternate between the inexplicable things being done to Merritt and Merritt's memories, something doesn't seem right.  His memories cover a considerable passage of time, decades possibly, from his affair with Erika, the seti project's director's wife, to his resignation and subsequent employment at NASA where he becomes immersed in the study of other star systems, searching for those which approximate earth-like conditions.  

He is totally dedicated to his work, and the only personal relationship he has is with Erika, the now ex-wife of the project director.  She has created a career out of conducting guided tours of  young, wealthy businessmen, and whenever she is in town, they get together.  Her charm and attractiveness are her strengths, but as the years pass, these begin to fade.  Finally she decides on the long sleep, to be awakened when effective rejuvenation techniques are developed.  


Merritt doesn't understand her.  They live in two worlds:  she in the physical here and now, while he in essence lives in the future, absorbed in searching the universe for answers.   Centuries ago Merritt might have been a theologian or philosopher searching the heavens for answers to the perennial questions.   Or, perhaps a priest/astrologer searching the heavens for signs of or hints from a divinity or divinities.  Is his now scientific search for signs of life in the universe that different?   What is also surprising is that Merritt never considers going for the long sleep, to be awakened when there is definite proof of intelligent life on other planets.  I wonder if, for Merritt, the search is what is important, not the result.

Some years later, seeking something, he visited the Krishna temple. . .they led him through a beaded curtain to the outside.  They entered a small garden through a bamboo gate, noisily slipping the wooden latch.  A small man sat in lotus position on a broad swath of green . . . Merrick explained his feelings, his rational skepticism about religion in any form.  He was a scientist.  But perhaps there was more to these matters than met the eye, he said hopefully.

The teacher picked up a leaf, smiling, and asked why anyone should spend his life studying the makeup of this leaf.  What could be gained from it?

Any form of knowledge has a chance of resonating with other kinds, Merrick replied.

So? the man countered.

Suppose the universe is a parable, Merrick said haltingly.  By studying part of it, or finding other intelligences in it and discovering their viewpoints, perhaps we could learn something of the design that was intended.  Surely the laws of science, the origin of life, were no accident.

The teacher pondered for a moment.  No, he said, they are not accidents.  There may be other  creatures in this universe, too.  But those laws, those beings, they are not important.  The physical laws are the bars of a cage. The central point is not to study the bars, but to get out of the cage.  

Merrick could not follow this.  It seemed to him that the act of discovering things, of reaching out, was everything.  There was something immortal about it.

The small man blinked and said, it is nothing.  This world is an insane asylum for souls.  Only the flawed remain here.

Merrick began to talk about his work with NASA and Erika.  The small man waved away these points and shook his head.  No, he said.  It is nothing.

(The italicized part above was actually one paragraph which I broke down) 


Merrick can not understand the teacher's dismissal of the physical universe just as he didn't understand Erika's immersion in it.  He seemed to be somewhere in the middle: the physical universe was important as something to study and learn from.  While he went beyond Erika's immersion in the physical universe, he could not leave it behind as the teacher had insisted that he must.

Later, he encounters a woman in the street whom he thinks is Erika.  However, when their eyes meet, she shows no reaction, and Merrick realizes that his interest is purely intellectual.  That part of his life was over, for he hadn't been with a woman in years.

It is ultimately a sad story, for Merritt has grown old, but he refuses to believe it.  He hadn't noticed the years passing by because of his obsession.  He doesn't even have the satisfaction of having his abduction prove the existence of aliens, for those white creatures are doctors and nurses, and in his drugged state he doesn't recognize an operating room.

Perhaps I'm going too far here, but it seems to me that differing attitudes to life and existence are presented here.  At one end of the spectrum is Erika's immersion in the physical world, while at the other end is the teacher's dismissal of it as unimportant, "it is nothing."  Merrick would seem to be in the middle somewhere: the physical world is important, not in itself, but as a means of finding its purpose, its design.   But, while it appears that three views are presented,  I can't see any conclusion to be drawn from them as to which would be the most fulfilling one.

I am unhappy with my reading of the story.  I wonder what I have missed or misread.  I shall have to return to this tale sometime to see how it has "changed."

Gregory Benford: "Nobody Lives on Burton Street"

Gregory Benford
"Nobody Lives on Burton Street"
from The Best of Benford
David Hartwell, editor 
a short story first published in 1975


Nobody Lives on Burton Street  (1970)

"I was standing by one of our temporary command posts, picking my teeth after breakfast and talking to Joe Murphy when the first part of the Domestic Disturbance hit us.

People said the summer of '78 was the worst ever, what with all the pollution haze and everything was kicking up the temperatures,  than '78.  Spring had lost its bloom a month back and it was hot, sticky--the kind of weather that leaves you with a  half-moon of sweat around your armpits before you've had time to finish morning coffee.  The summer heat makes for trouble, stirs up people. . .

.  .  .  . 
I turned and walked back out onto the roof where we had our command post.

We knew the mob was in the area, working toward us.  Our communications link had been humming for the last half hour, getting fixes on their direction and asking the computers for advice on how to hand them when they got there."



The above quotation from the beginning of the story seems fairly straightforward.  The story takes place in an urban setting, a mob is on the loose, and the authorities are getting ready to handle the situation.  The mob appears, waving clubs and torches and setting some of the building ablaze.


But then, I get the feeling something was wrong.  Those in the command post didn't seem strongly affected when several police officers and firefighters who had arrived on the scene were brutally attacked by the mob. Those in the command center acted as though all was going as expected.   In fact the arrival of the police and firefighters was carefully orchestrated from the command center.  There was some suggestion that the police squad car was controlled from the command center.  


SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON







All is not what it appears to be.  What the reader perceives is not the real situation.  This is not an out-of-control rampaging mob but a carefully staged cathartic event.


The reader eventually learns that the mob action is actually a planned event.   Citizens can register to take part in an upcoming planned riot, after a psychological screening to determine if they would benefit from participation.  Moreover, the command post is not staffed by police officers, but members of the city's public relations department, and the police and fire personnel are androids.

While there's been a long-standing debate on the precise meaning of catharsis, in popular usage today, it usually refers to the purging of strong, possibly disruptive or dangerous emotions through the vicarious experience of similar tragic or violent events.  Simply put, it suggests that viewing violent destructive actions will reduce the possibility that the viewer will engage in such actions in the future, an emotional escape valve.  This staged riot carries the theory a step beyond vicarious observation.  It allows the participants to partake in a riot, although carefully monitored and controlled.  The assumption is that participants will have purged the anger, hostility, tension sufficiently to reduce the possibility that they might get caught up in a real riot.

While not brought up in the story, there is an opposing theory--desensitization. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, desensitization actually extinguishes or at least reduces an emotional response (as of fear, anxiety, or guilt) to stimuli that formerly induced it. Consequently, participating in an activity increases the chances that one will engage in it again.   As you can see, this directly contradicts the cathartic theory.  Not only does it contradict the cathartic theory, but it also insists that putting the cathartic theory into practice will make the problem even worse.  Those who take part in the staged riot will be desensitized to the destruction and the killing of the police and fire personnel on the scene  and, therefore, are more likely to do it again.

One can wonder whether the cathartic process is actually working, for in the first paragraph of the story, the director of the staged riot remarks that last year was the worst ever for riots and now "it was a year later and getting worse."  Does this suggest that the staged and managed riots are making the situation worse?

This is just another example of that short-sighted behavior we humans are not only capable of  but far more likely to engage in, instead of intelligent problem solving behavior.   As usual, the powers-that-be prefer to attack the symptoms of a problem, rather than the causes.  

Gregory Benford: The Berlin Project

Gregory Benford
The Berlin Project


 The Berlin Project is an alternate universe tale that up to a certain point reads more like a docudrama, a depiction of real events that have been filled out in places by the writer.  The first part takes place in the days before WWII, of the beginnings of what was to become the Manhattan Project.   The movement of the scientists from the first implications of what "splitting the atom" to the realization that this could be a source of power and a destructive weapon unlike anything possible at that day.  There was at the same time the fear, supported by rumors and certain actions by German scientists, that Germany was also going along the same path.  Eventually it was decided to try to beat the Germans to the bomb.

Research then suggested that U235 would be the best for such a bomb.  The project then came to a decision point: what method would be most effective in separating out U235 from U238?  It is at this point, that the novel moves, at least as far as I can tell, completely into the alternate universe.  In the real world, it was decided to use the gas diffusion method, whereas in The Berlin Project, the powers-that-be went with the centrifuge method.

In the Afterword to the novel, Benford says that even by the '60s we knew that the centrifuge method would have been the best choice.  The decision in favor of the gas diffusion method  resulted in a delay of a year or more in developing the bomb, which then had little effect on the war in Europe.  The decision in the novel to use the centrifuge method gave the Allies the bomb a year earlier; in fact the bomb was ready just before the Normandy invasion.  This changed the outcome of the war.

I felt, to some extent that the novel had two parts.  The first, as I mentioned above, reminded me of a docudrama as it had considerably more detail leading up to the production of the bomb than I would normally expect in an alternate history tale.  What happens after the production and use of the first bomb is similar to what I usually find in an alternate history--a wide divergence from the events of the real world.   The detailed account of the scientific struggles to produce the bomb is over and is followed by a more action-oriented story and speculation as to the long-term effects of its use in the other world.

In the Afterword,  Benford tells us that most of the characters in the novel were real, including Karl Cohen, the POV character, who happens to be his father-in-law.  Considerable information obviously came from him.  In addition to physicists and mathematicians, other real people appear or are mentioned: James Benford (Benford's father was in the army during WWII) who appears in a walk-on role, as do these people who would be familiar to some, I suppose--Cleve Cartmill (author of a story that got the FBI interested), Anson McDonald (better known as Robert Heinlein, who also was the author of a story that got the FBI interested), John W. Campbell (who published both stories), Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur C. Clarke.

And, at one point in the novel, a character remarks: "tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun."   Those familiar with the work of Alfred Bester will recognize this.

Overall I found it a very interesting read.  While the details of the research and succeeding struggle to produce the bomb did not happen that way in our world, it gave me more of an idea of what those efforts were like, and also a closer look at the politics and in-fighting that tool place within the Manhattan Project, something I had never heard of before.

As I mentioned above, Benford provides an 18 page afterward  with a brief discussion of  the major events as it happened in the real world, and a brief biography of the major characters in the work.  Benford says that several of the characters are still alive today.  He also points out the irony of the development of the bomb in that many of the important scientists in the Manhattan Project were refugees from Europe, fleeing the Nazis. 

If you have read a number of novels and short stories by Greg Benford, I think you will be surprised by this one.  It's not like anything I have read by him so far.

Kevin J. Anderson and Gregory Benford: Mammoth Dawn

Kevin J. Anderson
Gregory Benford
Mammoth Dawn


This is a rather unusual book.  The core is the novella, "Mammoth Dawn," a collaboration by Gregory Benford and Keven J. Anderson.

Husband and wife geneticists, Alex and Helen Pierce, have developed a method of extracting DNA from the preserved remains of now extinct animals.  On their ranch in Montana, they have brought a number of extinct species back to life:  dodos, moas, mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers.  Others are at the development stage.

Of course, there is opposition.  One group, the Evos, argue that it was God's plan that these species went extinct and that the Pierces are violating that plan, usurping God's prerogative to decide what species live and which ones die.  In addition, it becomes a political, as well as a scientific and religious issue, and Congress becomes involved.   Some proposed legislation would stop such research.  The Pierces have to defend themselves on two fronts, a dangerous situation to be in.

Unfortunately, the Pierces make a mistake and underestimate the protestors camped outside the ranch's boundaries.  One night they pay for this when the Evos mount an armed attack, with disastrous results for the Pierces and their dreams. 


The novella, though, is just one of six parts of this book, as can be seen by the "Contents" page.


A.  "Introduction:  Cloning Mammoths"

The genesis of the novella, "Mammoth Dawn," was a conversation between Keven J. Anderson and Gregory Benford, inspired by the film Jurassic Park, about the possibilities of cloning dinosaurs. 



B.  "Mammoth Dawn: The Original Novella"

The novella as published in Analog in 2002. 




C. "Mammoth Dawn:  Full Treatment and Proposal
Benford and Anderson had decided that the short story wouldn't do justice to their thinking on the topic, so they planned  to expand the work to novel length.  What follows is their development of the ideas about cloning extinct species and a proposal for a full-length novel.


 D. "Overview"
    "Scientific Basis--Why Mammoths? Why Now?
      Self-explanatory-- four pages
 


What follows is an explication of the proposed novel.
E.  "Prologue--The Hunt"
     "Part I--Mammoth Ranch"
     "Part II--The Resurrection Preserve"
     "Part III--Survival of the Fittest"
     "Part IV--Pleistocene Rules"

Part I is an expansion of the novella while the following three parts relate the aftermath of the attack on the ranch and its consequences.



The last section of  Mammoth Dawn:  a discussion of the status of cloning research.
F. "Bringing Back the Mammoths"
       "Why?"
       "How?"
       "When?"


Unfortunately the novel has yet to be written, and sadly, may never be written, for Anderson says in the "Introduction,"

     "The novel of Mammoth Dawn would be a huge project, even for a pair of seasoned writers, entailing a great deal of travel, research, and likely years of writing.  We loved the idea.
      We didn't have time for it, but we meant to."


It's an excellent action-packed short story, but I do wish that, in the near future, they do find the time to write the novel

Gregory Benford: two short stories from the Galactic Center Universe

The Galactic Center series consists of six novels, ranging in time from the late 1990s to 30,000+ years in the future, and from Earth to the center of our galaxy.   To be brief, it is the story of the war between the Mech civilization, ruled by almost godlike AIs, and all organic life forms, especially the sentient species, including humanity.  In the 30,000+ years, humanity has managed, in spite of the conflict, to spread throughout the galaxy, including locations close to the black hole at the galaxy's center.
 
Gregory Benford to this point actually has written three short stories set in the Galactic Center universe. One, "Hunger for the Infinite," published in Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg, explores the Mantis' obsession with the inexplicable human propensity for art.  I have posted a very brief commentary which can be found at this address:  http://tinyurl.com/p4a7gkj

The other two stories, "Aspects" and "At the Double Solstice," are set on Snowglade, the setting for the third novel in the series, Great Sky River.  While the stories do not have dates, internal evidence in the stories indicate that "Aspects" takes place a decade or more after the end of events in Great Sky River, while "At the Double Solstice" is set many decades later.


The third novel in the series, Great Sky River, is the story of the Bishop clan's struggle to survive after the destruction of their civilization on the planet Snowglade.  (For more detailed information, see my post at http://tinyurl.com/gu7gd2h.)  The two stories are set after the conclusion to the novel Great Sky River and follows those members of the Bishop clan who did not follow Killeen Bishop.

Both stories open with a battle with several mechs, in which one or more humans are killed.  Eventually the mech (possibly a lancer or a marauder or worse, a mantis type) is also destroyed.  However, the cost to the humans is far greater in that they have now lost irreplaceable knowledge and experience, while the mech factories can simply turn out one or two or more marauders.  This battle  is followed by the discovery of a mech production facility which the Bishops attack.  They grab what nutrients and equipment that can be easily carried and leave before more mechs arrive.

While the pattern here is similar, the third element demonstrates that a change has taken place in the thinking of the Bishop clan.  In both stories, the humans come across a human artifact, a large structure whose purpose has long since been forgotten.  In "Aspects,"  the humans are happy to find such a place:  "We built it," a younger said. "We made something...beautiful."  They rest there and discover that it's a cache, a storehouse of information from the past which will help them survive in their struggle with the mechs.  Some of them were old enough to have lived in their great cities and consider it a Golden Age.  They would go back, instantly, if they had the opportunity.

In "At the double solstice," decades? later, however, the reaction to the structure  is quite different.  The Bishops have difficulty in believing humans could ever have built such a mechlike thing.  Only the mechs created things that were rigid, with corners and straight lines. Natural things were very different, far superior, and their way was the best way.
. 
"If humanity had been mechlike in the far past, even to the point of making things of stone that trapped feeling. . .Agaden curled his lip.  If that was true, then he felt no reverence for those benighted ancestors.  He was suddenly glad to live in a holier and wiser time.  Humanity today knew the true division between the sweet passing beauties of things human, and the cruel hard mech ways."

What began as a necessity for survival has now been transformed into the best way for humanity.  The Bishops have adopted the nomadic way, not as a bitter choice for survival, but now as the best way, the holiest course for humans.  They now have the disdain that all true nomads have for fixed, artificial structures and a settled way of life. 

Truth in whateveritis: I have received free digital copies of both short stories.

Gregory Benford: the last of the Anomalies

These are the last stories from Greg Benford's latest collection of short stories,  Anomalies.



"Gravity's Whispers"
A CETI Tale:   A scientist with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory--a real institution sponsored by CalTech and MIT) has detected a gravity wave fluctuation and sent it to a mathematician to see if there's something there.  There is, but it's an artificial pattern, obviously created by someone?  And, there's a problem.  To be able to create a gravitational wave with a signal requires the ability to "sling around neutron stars and make them sing in code." Do we really want to open communication with a race so powerful?



"Ol' Gator"
 Evolution seems to be the focus of this strange little story.  It's a narrative told by a GI in Iraq.  He alternates between what's happening to him during the conflict with Saddam Hussein's troops and  memories of his childhood days in the South.  It was that part of Iraq that had been swampland and then partially drained that brought back those memories, for the crocs in the swamp reminded him of the gators back home and his grandpa's war with the patriarch of the swamp--Ol' Gator. 

At one point in the story the narrator is separated from his unit and finds a very large contingent of Iraqi insurgents headed his way.   However he finds he's not alone, for he has some very unusual companions.  Rather than spoil the fun, I'll just quote Loren Eiseley, the eminent anthropologist and essayist:  "The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back into the water. There are things still coming ashore."  from The Immense Journey. 



"The Champagne Award"
According to a Note provided by Benford, this is a satiric look at the government and population control.  As the general population seems unwilling or unable to control the birth rate, the government steps in with its own program.  People are issued KidCred cards which gives each person the right to bear a child.  They can use the credit themselves or can transfer it to someone else.  Or they could offer it in a lottery in which they get the proceeds.  That could turn out to be in the millions of dollars, if offered at the right time.  The parents of children born illegally, to those without KidCred or who have used up their KidCred, are fined heavily, and the children receive no social benefits and no education.  There is even some talk about prison sentences for those who bear children without KidCred.



"Mercies"
Inter-dimensional travel.  As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, one common theme in SF is the time travel story in which there is an attempt to go back in time to prevent some great evil or catastrophe: assassinating Hitler is a favorite among writers. This story doesn't involve time travel but a different method of preventing some evil.

Set some time in the future, Warren has become rich and uses his wealth to bring his dream to fruition.  He has hated serial killers since he first learned of them as a teenager.  It's too late to do something about those in the world in the dimension in which he resides, so he decides to do something about those in worlds in other dimensions, especially those so "close" that there's only a very small difference between them and his world.

He has the people who work for him research these other worlds for those who appear to be the counterparts of serial killers in his world.  He decides to kill them, and to kill them before they've started killing.  In other words, Warren has decided on a pre-emptive strike, since these people have not yet harmed anyone.  There's a problem though, something Warren did not take into account, but he eventually encounters it.

The moral question one might consider is Warren's justification for killing these people: they haven't harmed anyone at the point he is to kill them.  Is this justifiable? 

"Doing Lennon"
This is another cryonics tale. It was written in 1975, some five years before John Lennon was killed in 1980.  Henry Fielding has chosen "the long sleep" before he really needed it.  When he awakes in the 22nd century, he claims to be John Lennon and that he was "fleeing political persecution."  This is why he used the alias.

In his real life, Henry Fielding had been a broker who had done quite well financially, along with surreptitiously dipping into several accounts belonging to others.  He was a devoted follower of the Beatles, collecting records, memorabilia, and gossip about them, as well as memorizing the lyrics to all of their songs.  On his vacations, he haunted Liverpool, picking up the local colour and accents and visiting places important to the Beatles legend. Now he was going to put all that knowledge to work. 

Things go well for a while for him in the future: his singing and guitar playing are accepted by all.  Then things get complicated.  First, he is told that the corpsicle of Paul McCartney has been discovered, and everybody is breathlessly awaiting their reunion.  Then, he discovers Henry Fielding the Real.  Who then is he?



Afternotes
Brief comments by Gregory Benford about each of the stories.

Gregory Benford: Still more from Anomalies

More stories from Gregory Benford's latest short story collection: Anomalies


Comes the Evolution"


The characters talk, endlessly, about "revolution," but the title of the story refers to evolution, a gradual change that takes place, when one species slowly becomes another.  Note the names of the characters: Lenin, Trotsky, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Emma Goldman.  She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

They see themselves as revolutionaries, but their plans show them to be something quite different.  Eventually they all come together to rejuvenate the Cause, but their plans, however, have evolved into 21st century versions whose new focus is not on changing governments but upon finding a safe haven where they can create a utopia.


------------------------------------------------------------------

"Anomalies"

Another of Benford's short stories that plays with the theme of religion and science.  An amateur astronomer has discovered that the moon is a few minutes ahead of schedule.  It's still in its proper orbit, but it appears to have somehow been transported to an advanced position.  This is impossible, of course.  Later it is discovered that several stars are also not in their proper position and appeared to have suddenly moved within an hour of the time the moon had jumped ahead.  This also was impossible.

One of the characters theorizes that the universe is a computer program and the sudden movements were the result of a bug in the program.  This, of course, brings up the question of the identity of the programmer.  Also, computer programs are normally debugged, here on earth anyway.  Will this program be debugged?  What effect will this possible bug have on earth and how will the debugging take place?  Will it also affect earth?  Eventually a new field of study emerges: one that is a combination of science, philosophy, and religion--the field of Empirical Theology. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 


"Caveat Time Traveler"

This is a short story about time travel and some facts about human nature.  The title says it all:  Let Time Travelers Beware.  Human nature doesn't change.

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"Lazarus Rising"
This is a tale of cryonics.  Carlos Forenza is 87 years old.  He has come in for his medical checkup.  If they find something that can't be cured or is extremely expensive to cure, they would put him into cryonic sleep and let the future decide when it was ready to deal with his problem.  They wouldn't even wake him to inform him of the situation.  But, something has gone wrong for he is awake, with his senses disconnected.  Clearly he has returned to consciousness before the process of putting him into cold sleep has been codmpleted.  Now, he has to regain control of his body and let them know that something had gone wrong.


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"Isaac From The Outside"
This is a poem that brings in a number of  SF writers, one of whom, obviously, is Isaac Asimov.  The theme is simple:  one shouldn't make assumptions about a person from that person's writings.   The poem points out some inconsistencies between what these SF authors write about and how they live their own lives.

One topic covered is cryonics, about which many of these authors have written in various short stories and novels.  But, the poem goes one to ask the following: how many actually went beyond treating cryonics simply as a story element and looked into it as something they might actually consider for themselves? 

The next question should be the reader's question.  I've always considered cryonics simply as a story element.  But today there are companies in existence that will perform this service.  What about you?  Are you interested?

Hmmmm.  .  . I wonder how much it costs.

Gregory Benford: more from Anomalies

Here are several more stories from Greg Benford's latest short story collection:  Anomalies



"Twenty-Two Centimeters"

This story plays with one of the present theories of the universe-- the membrane theory.  I'll quote from the story itself, as one of the characters expresses her problem with the theory, which is the same as mine.

"She did not really follow the theory; she was an astronaut.  It was hard enough to comprehend the mathematical guys  when they spoke English.  For them, the whole universe was a sheet of space-time, called 'brane' for membrane.  And there were other branes, spaced out along an unseen dimension.  Only gravity penetrated between those sheets.  All other fields, which meant all mass and light, was stuck to the branes."

The "physics guys" discovered another brane just twenty-two centimeters away from our universe, in another dimension, and signals emanating from it.  They developed a portal into the other universe and Julie and Al,  being astronauts, and not having to understand the theory or the mathematics, were chosen to pop through the portal and take a look.  And discover the source of those signals.  This is a first contact tale, rather unique I thought.  It also has a vivid description of the Counter-Earth and its inhabitants. 




"Applied Mathematical Theology"

Benford here plays with an important astronomical discovery that plays an important role in the present theory regarding the formation of the universe.  It is not a story with characters, but a journal article or something similar that gives an account of "(t)he discovery that the Cosmic Microwave Background has a pattern buried within it (which) unsettled the entire world."

     The temperature of this 2.7 K. emission left over from the Big Bang varies across the sky.  Temperature ripples can be broken into angular- co-ordinate Fourier components, and this is where radio astronomers found a curious pattern--a message, or at least, a pattern.  Spread across the microwave sky there was room in the detectable fluctuations for about 10,000 bits, or roughly a thousand words."

Naturally considerable controversy raged about the message, its creator(s) (if one), and implications to be drawn from this.  At first, the most disputed issue was its nature:was it a real message or just a random collection of fluctuations?

"One insight did come from this, however.  Benford's Law (not the author, and a real law), which states that the logarithms of artificial numbers are uniformly distributed, did apply to the tiny fluctuations. This proved that the primordial microwaves were not random, and so had been artificially encoded, perhaps by some even earlier process.  So there was a massage, of sorts."


It's a short article, almost three pages long and possesses a rather tongue-in-cheek resolution, which leaves everybody happy. 




"The Man Who Wasn't There"

This is a high-tech action story set a few decades in the future.  Islamic extremists are trying to reconquer Europe through the use of terrorist tactics and the courts.  Fully aware of the West's ability to intercept electronic communications, they have gone to a low-tech solution--human memory.  All plans and strategies are now committed to memory and communicated by certain Masters.  And, these masters are fully prepared to commit suicide rather than be captured.

The anti-terrorist squad has learned that one of these masters is now living in a compound in one of the suburbs of Paris.  They are preparing to attack the compound and have a few surprises in store for the terrorists.  One is an invisibility suit, comprised of optical fibers which transferred light waves around the suit.  However, it was still dangerous because it affected light only, not an actual object, such as a bullet. They also had one other surprise for the terrorist.

To get in and get the information, they have to be fast and efficient.





"The Final Now"

With a stretch, one might see this tale as a sequel to the earlier story,"Applied Mathematical Theology,"  a story about a message that seemed to be encoded within the Cosmic Microwave Background."  The message's existence had been thoroughly documented, but three questions still remained: who left the message, why was the message left, and what was the message.

The story begins:

He suddenly thought that they had not seen anyone for quite a while.  Amid the vast voyages, adventures, striking vistas--and yes, while basking in symphonies of sensation--they had not needed company.
        Even as twilight closed in.  But now--
        "Do you recall--?"  He asked, turning to Her, and could not recall an ancient name.  Names were unimportant, mere symbols, yes. . .but He did remember that names had existed to distinguish between multitudes.  When?  First task: to name the beasts.  When had He and She said that?

.  .  .
They were, of course, the two who gave tension to this finite, bounded existence.  This universe.  Duality was fundamental, as was helicity itself, which necessarily had to be included in this exponentially expanding space-time.

Creativity seems to require two--male and female.  They had also brought forth the Others, short-lived and limited creatures, but who yet had consciousness and intelligence.  These, however, were not completely separate beings for the Others were, in a sense, part of the He and the She.  They were brought forth to "To summon up insights that lie within the two of us, but that we cannot express overtly. To be vast meant having parts of yourself that you could not readily find.

He and She now realize that the universe is running down.  They call forth one of the Others and tell him that the end time is near.  Upon hearing this, the Other said strongly, "I do not accept this."  At last, the point.  She said with love and deep feeling, "Then strive to alter."

 Perhaps this story provides the answers to the earlier story in the collection as "The Final Now" was published four years after "Applied Mathematical Theology."

Perhaps not.   

 Your thoughts?

Gregory Benford: Anomalies

Gregory Benford
Anomalies
a collection of short stories (1975-2012)

The following are three of the short stories found in Gregory Benford's latest short story collection, Anomalies.  The stories focus on a wide variety of topics, from wormholes to AIs to string theory.  I will post brief reviews of the other stories in the collection over the next few weeks.


"A Worm in the Well"


Claire, the pilot/owner of an independent freighter,  is deep in debt, so much so that she about to lose the freighter to her creditors.  She more or less controls the ship with the aid of Erma, a wisecracking AI.  Erma knows that she really runs the ship.

Claire takes on a high-paying but dangerous job--dropping down into the sun's corona to take photos of a wormhole that has suddenly appeared.  The scientific community is seriously bothered by the appearance of a wormhole so close to the sun and need the photos and other data gathered by her close encounter by the sun in order to determine what the dangers are.

Once there, however, she decides to do a career change from "nature photographer" to a "bring 'em back alive" hunter.  The photos and data still won't bring in enough money to pay off all of her debts, but capturing and bringing back a wormhole, something that has never been done before, will give the scientists an unparalleled opportunity to study and even experiment with a wormhole.  Claire figures that she can negotiate a much bigger fee.  Erma, of course, has her doubts.

The story naturally is heavy on the science, but the information is handled very nicely in the arguments (discussions) between Claire and Erma.



"The Worm Turns"
It's several years later and Claire and Erma are still broke and about to lose the ship again.   This time they are forced to take on a hazardous job: it's either that or lose the ship.  Since Claire transported the wormhole away from the sun, earth scientists have meddled with it and enlarged it.  It now is more likely to be dangerous to anything in the neighborhood, the solar system for example.

Claire's task is now to fly through the wormhole, check out the other side, and then report back.   However, life (or a wormhole)  is never that simple, so life gets exciting again.  And, what she finds at the other end is something neither she nor Erma nor the scientists expected. 


"The Semisent"
In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman,[a] novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important (from the Wikipedia entry on Bildungsroman).

What's unusual about this short story is that it's a bildungsrom or coming-of-age story, not about a human being but an AI.  The AI begins as a small box and by the end of the story it has evolved into a tall distinguished gentleman with sorrowful blue eyes.  And there's also a human involved.

Some novels, stories, and poems that I revisit regularly, Pt. 2

These are stories and authors who popped up after I began the first post on works I regularly reread.  And, as I think about what I'm going to write about them, the urge to jump up, hustle over to the bookcase, and dust them off for another reread is ever present.  Oh well, it's that old "too few hours or years and too many books" problem as usual.


Herman Melville
Mardi
I have a theory that every writer has a wild book tucked down deep inside somewhere.  Some manage to get it out, while others either repress it or aren't aware of it.  If it does get out, then readers and critics are confused and generally don't like it, for it's not what they want or expect from the writer.  I think Melville's wild book is Mardi.  And, in my usual contrary way, I consider it a favorite.  Mardi is satire, rather like Gulliver's Travels which was published in 1726 and revised in 1735,  whereas Melville's work was published in 1849.  Melville may have been influenced by Jonathan Swift, but I haven't read any scholarly commentary that suggests that.

In Mardi,  Taji, the narrator, is in pursuit of his lost love, Yillah,  a Polynesian woman whom he had  rescued from native priests who were going to sacrifice her to their gods.  She was once again kidnapped, and Taji, in a small boat, went off in search of her once again.  He is accompanied on his mission byKing Media, who was bored with his duties and looked for adventure; Babbalanja,  a philosopher;  Mohi, an historian; and Yoomy, a poet.   As you can imagine, with such a crew representing the political, the philosophical, the historical, and the poetic viewpoints, there are long and sometimes confusing discussions about the universe and everything else as they traverse the  South Seas in search of Yillah.  During their journey they visit various islands, each of which exhibits some facet of human cruelty or weakness or folly.  One of the islands is obviously Europe and another is the US in the late 1840s.

Some contemporary critics have called it an allegory and others "a mess."  Some have called it both an allegory and a mess.  It's one of those books that the reader has to go along with Melville (or Taji) and enjoy the ride and not insist on a tightly woven consistent narrative with no loose ends at the end.
Read it for fun, and whatever else you can get out of it. 


Herman Melville
The Confidence Man:  This is a short allegorical novel set on a Mississippi riverboat, the Fidele, Fidelity or Faith in English, if I'm not mistaken. It consists of a series of encounters that passengers have with various confidence men (or perhaps really only one in disguise), all "representing" various charitable organizations.  Perhaps what fascinates me the most is that I'm never quite sure what underlies the various encounters.    

Herman Melville
Moby Dick is probably considered his greatest work, if not one of the greatest novels written in the US during the nineteenth century, if not also the twentieth century.  It's too early to say anything definite about the twenty-first century, but so far I haven't seen anything to compare to it.  It's a comedy, a tragedy, a revenge play, a travelogue, a history of whaling, and a scientific treatise on cetology.  Enough said.




Greg Benford:
The Galactic Center Series
Six novels.  The first is In the Ocean of Night which was published in 1977.  It is set in the late 1990s on Earth and near-Earth space and features the adventures of Nigel Walmsley, a Brit who somehow got himself a position as an astronaut in the NASA Space Program.  He wanted to go into space and England didn't have a space program.  The sixth novel is Sailing Bright Eternity, published in 1996 and is set some 30,000+ years in the future in the vicinity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

In between are some of the most spectacular science fiction adventures I've ever read and that covers 60+ years of reading SF.   In volume three, Great Sky River, published in 1987, we jump ahead some 30,000 years and meet Kileen Bishop and his group of friends and relatives on the run from the mech civilization, AIs and robots who are determined to wipe out all organic life.  Bishop and the other humans are closer to being cybernetic hybrids than 100% human with their metal and plastic reinforced exoskeletons and electronically enhanced senses.  Volumes Four, Five, and Six are mostly concerned with the activities of the Bishop clan and their struggle to avoid destruction by the mechs. However, there a few surprises in store for the reader.



Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon

It's one of the great mystery novels, at least to my way of thinking.  Part of its attraction may be that when I read the novel, I always see the actors from the film playing their respective roles.  I must also admit that I've seen the film more often than I've read the novel.  Actually I saw the film first, actually long before I read the novel.  It features a tough, cynical detective, a femme fatale, sleezy villains, and, of course, the Falcon!  Great stuff.


Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek
This is another example of having seen the film first and then reading the novel, primarily because of the film.  A young bookish intellectual attempts to escape his cloistered life by reopening a lignite mine on Crete which he has inherited.  He is aided and abetted and confused by Zorba, an adventurer, miner, soldier, and survivor.  Zorba is the exact opposite of the intellectual--earthy, practical, exuberant, almost a life force in himself.   The book is ironic in that it encourages the reader to put down the book and go out and do something in the real world.  After reading Zorba, I got so entranced by Kazantzakis' works, that I went out and read everything of his that I could find.  I think that by now I've read almost everything he's written that's been translated. 


George R. Stewart
Earth Abides
This is another of my favorite SF post-holocaust novels.  It's what I call a quiet novel in that it depicts the quiet day-by-day struggles of the survivors of a war that killed most of the humans on Earth.  There are no mutant, slavering monsters, semi-human or otherwise.  The threats are the typical ones of providing food and shelter, and dealing accidents and disease in a world without ERs and vaccines.  And, of course, there are some who figure taking food, etc. is easier than working.  It's also the story of how myths about the survivors or first families begin in a society that is largely illiterate and how those survivors might be viewed in the future.  One other element is that of the making of a sacred symbol purely by accident.  


Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet
I was hooked from the first pages of Justine, the first novel in the series.  It was on the reading list of a class I took, and I immediately went out and got the next three.  I've read it at least 3 or 4 times now and had to search for the hardbound copies as the paperback ones were disintegrating.

Justine:  LGD's accounting of events of past year spent in Alexandria just before outbreak of WWII--primarily of his relationship with several women, one of whom is the enigmatic Justine. 

Balthazar: LGD sent his manuscript to Balthazar, one of his friends in Alexandria who also appears in the manuscript.  Balthzar then returns the novel with his version of those same events as seen from his perspective.  We now have two versions of what happened.

Mountolive:  a third version of that same period by Mountolive (who is mentioned in the first two books) of the same events, giving a third and  completely different version of LGD's relationship with Justine.

Clea:  this is an accounting of the events that take place when LGD returns to Alexandria in the midst of WWII, about a year or so after the events told in the first three novels.

The series really asks us if we really ever know the full story of our own history. 


 Durrell's second series, The Avignon Quintet--he sometimes referred to it as The Quincunx and consists of the following five novels: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, and Quinx.

 This is a strange series of novels in which Durrell creates an Author who creates a character who writes a novel in which the Author includes a number of his friends and acquaintances, but takes "poetic" license in his creation. This is the first novel in the series--Monsieur.  

The remaining four novels are about the Author and his experiences in Egypt and France during WWII.  What is bizarre is that "fictional" characters from the first novel appear in other later four novels and interact with the Author and his friends.  In addition, several characters from "The Alexandria Quartet" also briefly appear. It's all rather confusing at times, and I had to create a diagram to keep the characters separate as many of the characters from the first novel are actually created from different friends and acquaintances of the Author. 

One of these days I will go back and reread both series for a third? fourth? time. 




Ursula Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness

This novel is one of my top ten SF novels.  If anyone ever asks me to recommend an SF novel for someone who has never read SF, I always mention this one.  It is well-written and has  an engaging main character, action, and an idea to explore.  The idea is simple.  Humans do not have sexually active periods like so many of our fellow residents here on earth. Humans are sexually active all the time.   Moreover, humans like most of our neighbors here have two genders, male and female.  Le Guin in this novel asks the question:  What if humans had specific periods in which they were sexually active and in between those periods, they were sexually neuter?

Winter or Gethen, as the inhabitants call it,   is a planet in which someone has apparently modified humans.  Humans on this planet become sexually active every three weeks and remain so for several days.  At this point they develop sexual characteristics, typically at random, so that humans on this planet can become either male or female. If a Gethen is paired with someone It (they are genderless during this period--what pronoun would you use?) likes, then the first one to go into kemmer (their term for the sexually active period) becomes by chance either male or female.  The other one then becomes the other sex.  If the one who becomes a female at that point gets pregnant, then that person will remain female and nurse the child until it is weaned.  At which point, that person then reverts to the sexually neutral state.  So, in a family pair with two children, each of the two adults could have been the mother of one of the two children.  As you can see,  this upsets all of our ideas about what males and females are like.  In fact, that's the issue Le Guin explores in this work: what are the real characteristics that belong exclusively to males and females.  If you haven't read this one yet, I strongly recommend you do so.

   

Kim Stanley Robinson
Three Californias:  Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge
When first published, they were known as the Orange County Trilogy, but the series title was changed when the trade paperback edition was issued.  My own name for these three is The California Troika.  A troika is a Russian horse-drawn vehicle in which the three horses are side-by-side, so there is no lead horse.  The three novels in this series all take place in the Orange County area at approximately the same time, some years in the future. But, this is an alternate universe series like no other I have read.  I have made several posts on these works, and clicking on the label Three Californias or The California Trioka will take you to them.  If you decide to read them, it makes no difference with which one you start.

The Wild Shore is set some half century or so after the US was destroyed by a sneak nuclear attack.  It is the story of a young male, late teens, and his experiences during one year in a small village that has grown up after the bombing.  In that respect, it is somewhat similar to another of my favorite post-holocaust novels, Earth Abides by George Stewart. 

The Gold Coast is set some years in the future and is an extrapolation of what life would be like if there were no dramatic changes.  The main character, again, is a young male, whose father is an engineer in the military-industrial complex--he works for a company that strives to get contracts to build hardware for the US military.  Like most of his friends, our hero is mildly opposed to what his father does for a living, and he is mostly concerned about the latest designer drugs, sex, and the contemporary music scene.  The novel is the story of events in this person's life that change him.

If the others can be classified as SF, then Pacific Edge is clearly a fantasy.  It is set some years in the future, again in Orange County,  in a world that has gone green.  Large corporations and nation states have been broken up all over the world.  Small is beautiful.  Recycling has become an important activity.  Cars are a rarity and most people get around a bicycles.  The main character is a young man, possibly in his early20s who has become the local expert in remodeling and fixing up abandoned houses. Local politics features strongly in the novel. 



Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Notes from the Underground"
This is almost impossible for me to describe.  The first part is a philosophical rant against those who think that human behavior will eventually be completely predictable and explainable by the immutable laws of science.  In addition the narrator contends that there are two types of people:  the doers and the thinkers or the intellectuals.   Everything that is accomplished is done only by the doers, because the thinkers are paralyzed when they attempt to handle all the ramifications of acting.


The second part shows our reclusive narrator in action and supports both of the arguments put forth in the first part.  In one sense, the work is an essay and an example of many of Dostoyevsky's themes that he depicts in his novels.



There are others, of course, but I have resolutely refused to think about them for fear that what was supposed to be one post will expand to a trilogy, or even worse.  Some may find it hard to believe that I actually do so much rereading, but I do and this explains why I really am decades behind in my knowledge of contemporary literature.  But, that's a decision I made long ago.  I'm sure you made your own and very likely it's not the one I made.  Be that as it may, there's room for both of us, isn't there?

I just realized that the title of the posts includes poems, and I haven't mentioned any at all.  Oh well, maybe some time in the not too distant future. . .


I hope you consider reading some of these. 

Gregory Benford: The Galactic Center Companion, an ebook

First things first:  truth in advertising or full disclosure or whatever it's called.  First, I received a free copy of The Galactic Center Companion.  Since I don't have an eBook reader,  Gregory Benford sent it to me by way of a link in an email.  Second, I am one of the contributors to the book. A series of posts I made in this blog were combined into an article for the New York Review of Science Fiction which Benford included in this  eBook.  It is included in the last section, titled "Perspectives."  I do not receive any financial remuneration from the sale of the work.  My sole reward, therefore, is being included in the work and being associated in some small way with what I consider to be the most imaginative hard SF series ever written.

Sections

INTRODUCTION

A Bit of History

A brief history of the sequence of the creation of the Galactic Center series during the years 1972 to 1995


A HUNGER FOR THE INFINITE

"Hunger for the Infinite" is a novella written for Robert Silverberg's  Far Horizons, a collection of short works set in an author's universe.  The collection includes short works by Ursula Le Guin,  Anne McCaffrey, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, Dan Simmons and others.

This story tells of an attempt by the Mantis (a recurring character in the last four of the six novels in the series) to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of the way organic beings think. One of the mysteries which the Mantis and all the higher intelligences of the mech civilization can not crack is that of art.   Mechs can do just about everything humans can do, but art is something that puzzles the Mantis.  Is art something that could enhance mech survival?   In "A Hunger for the Infinite,"  the Mantis interacts with a human in an attempt to discover the nature of art and its significance to humans.



LIFE AT THE GALACTIC CENTER: THE BIOLOGY I ENVISIONED THERE.

An accounting of the various life forms at the galactic center that Benford created for the series.


WRITING THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES: THOUGHTS ON WRITING A SERIES ALMOST WITHOUT MEANING TO

An extensive account by Benford of the growth of the series from 1972-1995.




ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 1988: An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center: my first published paper on the physics of the galactic center.

This is just what the title suggests: Benford's first paper on the galactic center and much of the science in the series comes from this paper. 



PERSPECTIVES

Reviews and commentaries

Articles by
Gary K. Wolfe
Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo
Fred Runk

Interview conducted by Paul Witcom

The 500th

According to the blog counter, this is my five hundredth post.  When I first began some four years ago, I had no goal or target to shoot at.  I just started posting and assumed that I would eventually lose interest or burn out or get interrupted by fate or some chance event.  I even wondered whether I would be able to come up with enough material to make more than a few posts.   I still may burn out or lose interest some day, and fate may still interrupt me, but I definitely won't run out of material.   One day years from now I may even reach 1000, maybe.

This does give me an opportunity to do something I've been thinking about for some time--compare the list of my favorite posts and the posts, according to the Blogger Stats, that have received the most visits.  I've often wondered how much overlap there really is.



The Ten Most Visited Posts (according to Blogger Stats)

N. Scott Momaday      The Way to Rainy Mountain
May 23, 2010             2422 visits

Shirley Jackson           "The Lottery"
June 27, 2010             1286 visits

Brian Aldiss               "Super-Toys Last All Summer"
March 25, 2011         679 visits

Robert Frost              "Storm Fear"
Feb. 3, 2011              521 visits

Alfred Bester             "Fondly Fahrenheit"
August 14, 2008        442 visits

Thomas Mann           The Transposed Heads
Nov. 3, 2011             428 visits

Robert Frost             a terrifying poet?
Sept 16, 2008          182 visits

Friedrich Durrenmatt    The Pledge, novel and film
Jan. 16, 2009              165 visits

Theodore Sturgeon      Three By Theodore Sturgeon
Jan 16, 2010                151 visits

Tales of Times Past     Japanese medieval stories
March 6, 2011           148 visits


It's a rather mixed collection.   I don't see much of a pattern here, except for some slight predominance of SF and fantasy, but that may be due to a predominance of posts about SF and fantasy.  I haven't really ever taken a genre census. 



The following is a list of some of my favorite posts.  I'm not certain exactly why they are.  Maybe some day I will be enlightened.  They are in no particular order.


The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam  --a series of posts, one for each quatrain in the first edition which has 75 quatrains.  I'm now up to Quatrain LXII, so I have thirteen to go to finish the work.

Kim Stanley Robinson:  four or five posts about his "Three Californias" series:   The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge. Each of the three novels depicts a different future for Orange County, California--a post holocaust future, a continuation of the cold war and the dominance of the military-industrial complex in the US, and an ecological/environmental oriented future, respectively.

Blade Runner--five versions of the film.

Shirley Jackson--"The Lottery"

Gregory Benford--The "Galactic Center" series:  six posts, each of which is about the six novels in the series, which is one of the greatest SF series (if not the greatest) ever written,  in my view anyway.  It begins in the late 1990s on Earth and ends somewhen about 35,000 (yes, thirty-five thousand) years in the future around the black hole at the center of our galaxy..

N. Scott Momaday:  The Way to Rainy Mountain,  part history of the Kiowa people, part legends of the Kiowa people, and part personal history of Momaday. 

The Rashomon posts, several posts about the film by Akira Kurosawa and the stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa that formed the basis of the film.

The Maltese Falcon:  a post discussing the three versions of Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon.

William Hope Hodgson:  The Night Land, a post about one of my favorite fantasy novels.

King Kong:  a post comparing the three versions of the film.

Ikiru: a post discussing one of my favorite films, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

Robert Frost  a terrifying poet?--a slightly different view of the poet

Robert Frost: "For Once, Then Something"


Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost:  "Hap" and "Design"

and others.


Not much overlap is there?

I've enjoyed the ride so far, so I guess I'll stay with it for a while longer.

And thanks, to you and the others who have visited me here and had something to say about what you read here.  Hearing from you is important and I think most every blogger would agree with me.

Robert Silverberg (ed): Far Horizons

Robert Silverberg (ed): Far Horizons


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ursula K. Le Guin: "Old Music and the Slave Women" (the Hainish and Ekumen series)

Joe Haldeman: "A Separate War" (the Forever Series)

Orson Scott Card: "Investment Counselor" (the Ender series)

David Brin: "Temptation" (The Uplift Universe)

Robert Silverberg: "Getting to Know the Dragon" (Roma Eterna series)

Dan Simmons: " Orphans of the Helix" (the Hyperion Cantos)

Nancy Kress: "Sleeping Dogs" (the Sleepless)

Frederik Pohl: "The Boy Who Would Live Forever" (the Gateway series)

Gregory Benford: "A Hunger for the Infinite" (the Galactic Center series)

Anne McCaffrey: "The Ship That Returned" (the Ship that Sang series)

Greg Bear: "The Way of All Ghosts" (the Way)



I just finished reading a interesting collection of short stories, or perhaps novella would be a better description. The collection is Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg. It contains eleven stories, all written specifically for this collection which came out in 1999. In his introduction, Silverberg writes

"What I have done in Far Horizons is to gather together most of today's foremost practitioners of the evolutionary science-fiction series and ask them to write a short story or novelette that explores some aspect of their famous series that they did not find a way of dealing with in the books themselves."

Unfortunately, some of the writers Silverberg would like to have included had died while others told him "that they had already said all they wanted to say. . ."

Silverberg defines "the evolutionary science-fiction series" as "the kind that carries the reader through an evolutionary progression of concept and (sometimes) insight into character." I guess it's a series in which the characters and the plot evolve over time, and in some cases the ending could never have been predicted from the first novel. Greg Benford's incredible "Galactic Center" series is a perfect example of this. One more point is that this is the type of series that should best be read in sequence.

The "template series," on the other hand, features a number of stories which are set in the same universe and which do not demonstrate any particular or significant change or development. Each work stands alone, even though set in a shared universe. In a template series, it usually makes little difference in the order in which the stories are read. I would guess that Andre Norton's "Witch World series" would be considered a template series in which there are a number of novels set on that planet, each of which is relatively independent of the others and shows little, if any at all, forward progression of plot or character.

Each of the eleven stories in Far Horizons is preceded by a 1-3 page introduction by the author. These very helpful introductions include a brief summary of the series and, usually, the place occupied by the short story within that series , and in some cases, the history behind the particular story.

For example, Joe Haldeman writes that people had always asked him about a sequel to The Forever War (TFW), and he had always insisted that "the book is complete. . .But someday [he] would write a novella about what happened to the characters later in life."

So, he gladly accepted Silverberg's offer to write that novella for the collection. However, shortly after beginning to write the novella, he found he was writing the sequel that he said he would never write. So, he turned that into a proposal for a novel and sent it off. It was eventually published as Forever Free.

William Mandella and Marygay Potter are the two main characters in TFW and are separated in the last part of the novel, presumably forever. However, the two are almost miraculously reunited at the very end. This story, "A Separate War," tells of what happened to Marygay during the period of her separation from William, and as Haldeman writes, "it also serves as a sort of foreshadowing of the new novel."

====================
Ursula K. Le Guin: "Old Music and the Slave Women" (The Hainish and Ekumen series)

Ursula K. Le Guin's "Old Music and the Slave Women" is set in her Ekumen universe, which includes her earlier "Hainish" novels, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions.
After the earth humans (descendants of the Hainish) and Hainish meet, a league is set up, the Ekumen. The novels set in this period are The Left Hand of Darkness (one of my top ten favorite SF novels), The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, and Four Ways to Forgiveness.

In the fourth book, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Le Guin introduces two new worlds, Werel and Yeowe, recently contacted by the Ekumen. Werel is a slave planet, in which a slave revolt is initiated as a result of the contact by the Ekumen. This story tells of one incident during that rebellion in which the intelligence officer for the Ekumen does something very stupid.

====================

Orson Scott Card: "Investment Counselor" (The Ender Series)

To quote Card, "During the three thousand years between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead . . . he somehow acquired a computer-based companion named Jane, who is second only to Ender in importance in the last three books of the series. The story now before you is an account of how they met." Fortunately for the human race, Jane is benevolent, as is Ender.

====================

David Brin: "Temptation" (The Uplift Universe)

This story tells of events following Brin's second novel in the Uplift universe, Startide Rising. When the earth exploratory vessel Streaker takes off in a desperate attempt to escape the alien fleet, a number of dolphins are left behind on the planet Kithrip. This story doesn't just fill in the gap of what happened to them after being left behind, but it also provides a significant development that could affect the entire structure of the present political situation. Unfortunately, not having read any of the novels beyond the third one, I don't know whether anything ever came of this encounter on Kithrip.

====================

Robert Silverberg: "Getting to Know the Dragon" (Roma Eterna series)

I hadn't known of this series before getting this collection. It's an alternate universe tale in which Silverberg's premise is that Moses never led the Hebrews out of Egypt. The Exodus never happened and therefore the Hebrews never settled in Palestine. Consequently Jesus of Nazareth did not exist and the Roman Empire remained pagan. The history of this world is generally the same until the 4th century (our time frame). The division between the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire therefore were strictly political, without any religious connotations. The quarrels were therefore reconcilable and the Roman Empire flourished.

The present story is set in 2503, by Imperial Time reckoning (1750 A. D.) and "fills in a gap in the series by depicting the Empire late in the Second Decadence, when the Emperor Demetrius II is about to come to the throne."

It looks like an interesting series, one that I think I may do some looking around for.

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Dan Simmons: "Orphans of the Helix" (The Hyperion Cantos series"

This story appears to be set after the conclusion of the four books in the Cantos. An exploratory and colonizing ship, the Helix, encounters a group of humans and aliens who are under attack by a device that visits their home periodically and gathers up large quantities of whatever they need from that particular site, including people.

The Helix discovers that this may not be a deliberate attack by another race, but a means of survival by a race with minimal resources. The material the device brings back may be necessary for their survival. Therefore, destroying the harvesting device may result in the destruction of a race of beings. Continued depredations by the harvesting device, though, will result in the deaths of many beings. This is the dilemma faced by the people of the Helix.

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Nancy Kress: "Sleeping Dogs" (The Sleepless)

This story is set in the same universe as Beggars in Spain, wherein genetic manipulation has permitted parents to specify the characteristics of their unborn offspring. The most radical changes are those that create the Sleepless, those who never sleep, thus giving them an extra 8 or more hours of consciousness.

"Sleeping Dogs" doesn't move the plot forward, but simply tells a story about one of the unexpected side effects of genetic manipulation on dogs. In this case, the dogs are modified to be sleepless and therefor make the perfect guard dogs. Unfortunately for Carol Ann's family, there's a problem with the modified dogs. The dogs were purchased for breeding purposes and intended to better the family's precarious financial situation. What they soon learn is that the dogs can not be trusted and they kill Carol Ann's sister. The story is Carol Ann's attempt to avenge her sister's death under the old Biblical adage--an eye for an eye. . .

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Frederik Pohl: "The Boy Who Would Live Forever" (the Gateway Series)

Stan, who has dreamed for years of getting to Gateway and becoming unbelievably wealthy (or so his dreams went) finally gets sufficient funds to make the trip. Shortly after he arrives, and after only one trip, the guidance programs have been translated and the exploration missions are no longer necessary. The Gateway Project has been terminated.

But--not completely. Robinette Broadhead, the main character in the first and several subsequent "Gateway" novels has discovered where the Heechee have fled, to a dark hole. A five person ship is being outfitted to follow the Heechee into their lair. Stan, who hasn't given up on his dreams, volunteers to be one of the five.

This story seems to be a wrapup. The mystery behind Gateway has been the Heechee: who were they and why did they go and where did they go. This story and the last novel in the series seems to answer all the questions.

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Gregory Benford: "A Hunger for the Infinite" (the Galactic Center series)

The "Galactic Center" series focuses on the conflict between the mechs, a machine society/ culture? directed by highly intelligent AIs, and all organic life, especially sentient beings, which the mechs see as their greatest enemy.

This story tells of an attempt by the Mantis (a recurring character in the last four of the six novels in the series) to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of the way organic beings think. One of the mysteries which the Mantis and all the higher intelligences of the mech civilization can not crack is that of art. The Mantis' attempts at creating art are rejected universally by all humans who have viewed them. Not only do the humans reject them, the humans are disgusted and sickened by the Mantis' artistic endeavors for they consist of horrific blends of semi-live humans and mechanical parts.

The Mantis decides to try a radical experiment. He downloads part of his consciousness into a human embryo to become an observer. The theory is that the observer will then learn what it is to be human (an organic sentient life form) which will allow it to grasp the meaning and significance of art. Its plan fails, but not for the obvious reasons. It shows the gap between the mech AI-based intelligence and the organic thinking based on intelligence and emotions.

I've always been curious about the Mantis, and this story provides some interesting information about it.

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Anne McCaffrey: "The Ship That Returned" (the Ship that Sang series)

In The Ship That Sang" we are introduced to Helva, the human intelligence that operates the ship. She is part of the ship, and the ship is an integral part of her. We meet her first partner, Jennan Sahir Silan, the "brawn" of the partnership, and her grief at his death, and her search for a new partner. She finally finds Niall Parollan. Subsequent novels tell of their adventures.

"The Ship That Returned" is the story of Helva who, in several ways, has now made a full circle. Niall Parollan, her long-time partner, has just died, and once again, she is on her way to begin another search for a compatible brawn at Central Administration on Regulus. However, before she gets to Regulus, she discovers a fleet of Kolnari on route to Ravel, obviously planning on raiding the planet and destroying as much as possible. Ironically it was on a mission to aid Ravel that her first partner, Jennan, was killed.

First, she sends off a warning to the nearest Administration base. She then goes to Ravel to warn the inhabitants of the horrors on the way to their planet. The inhabitants, however, seem unconcerned and respond to her warnings with reassurances that all will be well. Then the Kolnari arrive.

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Greg Bear: "The Way of All Ghosts" (The Way series)

This story is part of the series that includes Eon, Eternity, and Legacy. Bear, in the inroduction, tells us --

"The Way, an artificial universe fifty kilometers in diameter and infinitely long, was created by the human inhabitants of an asteroid starship called Thistledown. They had become bored with their seemingly endless journey between the stars: the Way, with its potential of openings to other times and other universes, made reaching their destination unnecessary."

However, other beings discovered the Way, the Jart, and the humans barely held them at bay, for a time anyway. "The Way of All Ghosts" is the story of one of those exploratory expeditions to a world accessible by the Way. It also is a story about Olmy Ap Sennen, shortly after his first reincarnation. He is destined to "become a living myth, be forgotten, rediscovered, and made myth again. So many stories have been told of Olmy that history and myth intertwine."

Overall Rating: I would rate Benford's story the most interesting, followed by Le Guin and Brin. There really isn't a bad story among the rest, and considering the lineup of writers, one really wouldn't expect to find one.

Gregory Benford: Sailing Bright Eternity, Galactic Center Book 6

Warning: I will discuss important plot elements and the resolution of the conflict between the Naturals and the Mechs.
Greg Benford's Sailing Bright Eternity is the sixth and final book in his mind-bending "Galactic Center" series, which began during the late 1990s in our solar system out on the rim of the galaxy and ended over 35,000 years later on the edge of a massive black hole, the Eater, at the center of the galaxy. I consider this series to be one of the greatest multi-volume SF works ever written.

Greg Benford is a physicist and astronomer, and he makes superb use of his knowledge as he takes what he knows and expands on it and does not allow it to set limits on his imagination. He has also created one of the most engaging characters in SF--Nigel Walmsley, the Brit who joined NASA in the 1990s and somehow managed to be around some 35,000 years later, thus being present at the beginning of humanity's role in the conflict with the mechs and also in at the resolution.

The story picks up where it ended in the previous book, Furious Gulf, with Toby, who has become separated from his father and the rest of the Bishop family. He has encountered a crusty old man who occupies what appears to be some sort of galactic library and who claims to be from the mythical planet Earth. He is of the Brit family, he jokingly tells Toby. It is Nigel Walmsley, whom we haven't heard of since the second novel, who then, as any old timer who hasn't had anybody to talk to for awhile, proceeds to fill Toby in on his part in the war against the mechs, a period which covers roughly 35, 000 years. Fortunately, for Toby, and for the reader also, Walmsley spent most of the time in deep sleep, so it's really not that long. In addition, Benford has kindly provided a Timeline for the Galactic series at the end of the novel.

As Walmsley finishes his tale, the mechs, once again, appear and attack. Walmsley and Toby are separated and we follow Toby as he flees the mechs and searches the Wedge for his family and friends. The Wedge is an habitat created long ago as a refuge for Naturals fleeing the mechs; it has various "pockets," with varying environments. Naturals are those life forms in the galaxy who evolved in the Darwinian mode whereas the mechs were initially created by a Natural species as a weapon of war (Fred Saberhagen has a similar entity in his "Berserker" series.)

What Toby doesn't realize is that the mechs don't want him dead, just yet. They are looking for his grandfather, Abraham (a great name for the founder of a family/tribe) . The mechs have recently learned, as have some of the humans, that there is a secret weapon that could destroy the mechs if it ever could be constructed. The instructions for the weapon are encoded in human DNA, that part called "junk" DNA that doesn't seem to play any role in human development. To get the information, DNA from three closely related humans is required. In this case, the mechs have decided on getting the instructions from Abraham, Killeen, and Todd. Therefore, the mechs keep prodding Todd on in hopes that he will meet up with his grandfather, whom everybody mistakenly had thought had died long ago.

At one point during his wanderings, Toby fashions a raft, deciding that that it would be easier to float down a large river than to try to make his way by foot along the bank. He eventually comes to a town built on the the river that seems quite strange. The prosperity of the town depends on the river and the mighty boats that move up and down that river carrying passengers and cargo. The inhabitants seem to have created a way of living possibly based on some historical setting.

Toby eventually gets a job on one of these boats, the Natchez, because of his recent experience coming down the river. At one point, Toby begins to have some thoughts about the river that seemed somewhat familiar to me.

"Under Mr. Preston he [Toby] was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a dead language to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. Not one page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time Vortex about to break through from the undercrust of timestone.

Passengers went oooh and aahhh at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was."


What's interesting is to compare this with a passage from Mark Twain's From Old Times on the Mississippi:

"It turned out to be true. The face of the water in time became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was devoid of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you could want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. . . The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on it surface . . . but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals with a strong of shouting exclamation-point at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that every floated. . . In truth the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter."


Again the mechs attack, and again Toby is forced to flee. After various adventures he does meet up with Killeen and Abraham. The Mantis, a mech who has long been the major foe of the Bishops, appears and is able to get the all-important DNA samples. The mechs now can decipher the DNA and study the weapon to determine just how dangerous it really is.

Yet, something is still missing, for there are gaps in the coding. Upon the threat of torture, Abraham reveals the code, which had been handed down through numerous generations in the Bishop family. He sings the code, which is actually a song, "a passage from the most hallowed of the musics the Bishops carried in their sensorium store. They had played it on the long marches together, knew its lines by heart. . . The highest of arts, the Mose Art."

The Mantis says, "I see the connection. The unused sites in the Bishop DNA--that is the key. The notes of this piece, arrayed in harmonics, yield the solution. I relay this to the Exalteds now."

Now the long search has ended: the Exalteds (higher-order mechs) had the information and could now begin to develop a defense against this weapon, whatever it was.

However, as smart as the mechs are, they can't come close to the deviousness of the Natural species. The humans are, in realty, bait. They never were expected to build this "weapon" and use it against the mechs. This is all part of the ruse designed to fool the mechs. The coding in the DNA and the aria is not a set of instructions for a super-weapon or even a revelation of some serious weakness in the mechs--it itself is the weapon. It is a virus, much like a computer virus, that attacks and ultimately destroys the memory and logic sections of the mechs. As a further example of the Natural's deviousness, the virus includes a directive that impels any mech infested with the virus to transmit the virus to any mech within reach.

The long war is over.

Now comes the hard part--persuading the few surviving mechs to join with the Naturals, for the universe will come to an end in a few billion years. The mechs must be convinced that they and the Naturals have a common goal here--to find out how to prevent this from happening or at least learn how to survive, until the next universe forms. Cooperation between them would seem to be absolutely necessary at this point.

I have already mentioned Benford's incorporation of some material from Mark Twain into his narrative. This isn't the only example for he skillfully and seamlessly interweaves some of the most common SF themes and plot devices into a coherent narrative structure frequently without the reader realizing what Benford has accomplished.

In the first novel, Benford confronts us with a situation that has already been found in numerous novels and films: a large asteroid is headed for earth and Walmsley is one of the two astronauts selected to destroy it. Yet, even in this situation that has almost become a cliche, Benford adds a twist that makes it a new and highly significant event. In the second novel, Across the Sea of Stars, the mechs' first attack on Earth reminds me of similar tactics used by the aliens in John Wyndham's Out of the Deeps (aka The Kraken Wakes).

Other situations and events in the Galactic Center series bring to mind Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and also his landmark short story, "The Sentinel." And, along with the incoming asteroid, Benford somehow manages to insert Bigfoot (aka Yeti) into the narrative as well as a religious cult that has gained sufficient political power to prohibit certain types of research and prevent the publication of research results that conflict with their religious beliefs (must be fiction, couldn't happen here in the USA).

The overarching plot structure of Benford's Galactic Center series is reminiscent of EE (Doc) Smith's Lensmen novels, which, like Benford's, consists of six works. In both works, the humans, although in the forefront of the fighting, are really weapons wielded by a superior race--Smith's Arisians and Benford's Higher-ups. And, the enemy forces also are controlled by superior beings--Smith's Eddorians and Benford's Exalteds. The identity of the leaders of the opposing forces aren't known to the humans at the beginning of the conflict. It's only as the conflict gains in intensity do hints and clues emerge which tell the humans that there are others involved in the struggle. Again, it's only in the final volume of both works that the ultimate leaders of both sides come out of hiding and reveal themselves. This is especially true of the first publication of Smith's series for he later revised the first volume to give the readers complete knowledge and novels' characters some knowledge of the Arisians and Eddorians and their struggle for control of the universe.

As I said earlier, I consider this to be one of the greatest SF series ever written, and I hope that I've been able to provide some convincing reasons why I believe this. Perhaps some time, someone reading this might be inspired to at least take a look at the first novel in the series.

The first novel in the Galactic Center series is In the Ocean of Night, in which we are introduced to Nigel Walmsley, who spends almost as much time and energy fighting NASA bureaucrats as he does the mechs. It is, therefore, fitting that these should be the last words of Sailing Bright Eternity, the final volume of this magnificent series:

"All was now quite modern and different around there and most of the ancient names on the graves mean nothing to anybody. There are Cards aplenty and Bishops and even a few Dodgers.

Nearby, old markers relate the names in a language now dispersed or dead. Killeen Bishop. Nearby, slightly less worn, Toby Bishop. These graves are unusually large, suggesting to archeologists that these were from the Hunker Down Era.

Always slightly distanced, alone and apart, Nigel Walmsley is buried on a separate knoll, in full view of the ocean of night."