Gregory Benford Interview – The future is all we have left

Jean: Hello, this is Jean Marie Ward for Buzzy Magazine. With me today is writer, physicist and winner of the 2019 Heinlein Award, Gregory Benford. Welcome Greg.

Gregory: Glad to be here.

Je an: We’re so glad to have you. Your most recent published books are both alternate history. “The Berlin Project” looks at the world that might have been if the U.S. had the A bomb before D-day. “Rewrite” offers a sequel to your classic timescape with a Groundhog Day twist. What occasioned this desire to remake recent history?

Gregory: Because it’s so tempting. There are so many pivot points, particularly in World War II and I as a physicist was very close to the issue of, how do you get the Uranium-235 to make bombs? You have to separate it out from the heavier 238 isotope. And the decision of how to do that, I had two choices and General Groves was forced to make the choice because the scientists were divided and he chose the wrong one and it cost us a year in the Second World War. It’s generally agreed by historians that had we suggested or made happen centrifically a separation, spinning cylinders, we would have chopped a year off the gaseous diffusion that Oak Ridge used and spent $1 billion doing. So, how would that change the war? You would have the bomb at D-day, well, how would you use it? And I use this title, “The Berlin Project” because that’s what the scientists in the project called it the first few years because the target was Berlin. Groves said that was too obvious.

So he called it the Manhattan Project and opened an office in Manhattan to give the excuse of, well, of course it was near Columbia University where all his work was done, but still they were always focused on Berlin. So, that was just too tempting because I was a postdoc for Edward Teller at Livermore for two years and then a staff member. He offered me a staff position which I took before I went to UC Irvine. And Teller told me all these delicious stories about the Manhattan Project. And I knew so many of them. The woman who helped me to do physics at UC San Diego, Maria Kepert Mayor, when I was working on problems with her and did a bunch of nuclear physics, again for my thesis, she won the Nobel Prize. And she told me all kinds of delicious stories about the Manhattan Project.

She was not an outgoing person, but she would tell her students these things, and I have a kind of magpie memory for things. I can remember stories people told me half a century ago, and also how they talked. So, I peopled the entire novel, “The Berlin Project” with people I knew. Harold Urey was on my thesis committee, all of this kind of stuff.

And then “Rewrite,” it was because I regard the assassination of Martin Luther King as the one interesting, strange incident in American history, which was a pivot because we know James Earl Ray was hired to kill Martin Luther King and we still don’t know who hired him. He went to his grave keeping it a secret. We know he got paid. So, I thought of a whole plot that ends up pivoting around that and how you stop that. But it’s also a big nostalgia trip about the movies from the late ’60s through the ’70s, the second golden age, which I’m a huge fan of.

So I used all the experience I had working in Hollywood on various aborted movies that were made from my novels to people the first part of the novel with all kinds of lore that you get from the rather seedy process of working with studios. So, it was just too tempting. You see, I’m using my own experience all the way through this. And the point about getting to be old, one of the few consolations, is you have a whole lot of experience you can use. You’ve got…you can mine the past because you were there, you knew it, you knew it in a way that no historian will ever know it because you lived it. And that’s so tempting that I just gave into it. And in fact after I finished the present novel called “Shadows of Eternity,” which is about a SETI library two centuries from now when we have lots of messages.

After that, I’m going to do a set of novels set in the ’80s into the ’90s, because of my long history with the CIA, because I’m just mining my own past. I did a lot of intelligence operations because I speak German and Russian, or rather [foreign language 00:04:48] and [foreign language 00:04:50]. And I used all that. So, come on. Life is essentially for a novelist a whole lot of material. One of the great problems with novelists is they spend most of their adult life alone in a room looking at a screen, not the kind of thing you can write about. So that’s why so many writers I think write about adultery, that’s the only material they have.

Jean: That’s so sad.

Gregory: Well, it depends on your point of view.

Jean: Well, somebody always gets hurt. How has your perspective on humanities possible futures changed in the 50 plus years you’ve been writing fiction?

Gregory: I was also always a Heinlein optimist. I saw the opening of the space program in 1957 when I was 16 years old as the thing which actually propelled me and my brother…I have an identical twin…to becoming physicists, because we saw the space program as a metaphor for an expansive future, and it still is. So, it is the nature of government to turn excitement into bureaucracy. That’s what’s happened to NASA, but now we’re seeing the emergence of the world that Heinlein foresaw in which space travel would be carried out by private interests, “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” So I always felt that the optimistic view of the future has many rewards. One of them is that it makes you think positively instead of obsess about the negatives. There are always negatives. Just read the front page of the newspaper. It is almost all the negative news, but the future can only whisper while the past and the present shouts in our media. You’ve got to listen to that whisper of the future. So, it is also good for your own character because too much of modern fashion and ideas is essentially nihilism of various kinds. And so, I am not crazy about getting that kind of thought into my work, because I think it doesn’t go anywhere.

Jean: You mentioned Heinlein. What do you think he would have said about you winning the award named after him after describing him as a time traveler?

Gregory: I knew Heinlein for almost 30 years and I was a guest in his home and all that, and he was very fond of my work. And my second novel, “Jupiter Project” is a direct homage to his novel. It’s a prequel to “Farmer in The Sky,” which I read in Boys’ Life Magazine, serialized in the ’50s. He always regarded me, he said so, as the kind of person who should drive science fiction because I was a real scientist and I really knew all this stuff. And I think he would’ve been happy to have me win this award. And I think he would’ve been happy with the work I’ve done, particularly with my twin brother, Jim, on exotic advanced spacecraft such as being driven sales and so forth, which has actually gotten real progress made. The whole breakthrough initiative, Breakthrough Starshot is based on our ideas because we did those experiments 20 years ago and showed that this thing was possible. Now they’re spending $10 million a year to try to develop it.

Jean: Hey, it takes a while when you do something new. We, you know, this addresses the next question. You had a long and much honored career as an astrophysicist and professor at the University of California, Irvine. Reviewers have talked about how your day job influenced your writing. What about the other way around? How has your fiction influenced your science?

Gregory: Several times the fiction has led me to consider a problem, such as the Galactic Center. Because I was interested in, and I was writing a series of novels, which I didn’t intend to do in a way, the “Galactic Center” novels. It was…the first one was published in 1977, “In the Ocean of Night,” and then five more such volumes. Because inevitably it seemed to me that the direction towards the center of the galaxy is the most exotic place in the galaxy. It’s like we’re living here in the boonies, in the ‘burbs, 26,000 light years out from this Galactic Center. But the Galactic Center started making stars 10 billion years ago. Our star is four and a half billion years old. So, that’s the Times Square of the galaxy. We are living in Jersey somewhere. So, the inevitably the whole focus of this series, which is about the fact humans discover, that the galaxy is largely dominated by machine intelligence is because they last longer. We tend to wear out and have short lifespans too.

So, I was led to be interested in it. And then in the late 1980s, a colleague of mine, Mark Morris at UCLA showed me a picture of radio filaments, which were 100 light years long, were very luminous. We could see them 26,000 light years away in the microwave frequencies. And weirdly enough, there were a bunch of them aligned like this, parallel filaments that were radiating synchrotron emission from relativistic particles. And I gave that constellation it’s name, The Claw, because it really looks like a kind of a claw. And so I started to think about it and I developed an electrodynamic model for how those were produced and why they’re so luminous and blah, blah. I actually predicted that one of them would kink. And five years later they discovered the snake, which has two kinks in it, which is 200 light years long because the longer the thing, the more likely it is to kink.

And so I was very pleased with that because I actually made a prediction, which is not often in astrophysics since you can’t control the experiments, they’re done by God. So, I was led into that work, which I still keep track of, the Galactic Center is enormously well studied. Somewhere in the next year they’re going to print or finally process an actual halo map of the black hole at the Galactic Center. A couple of months ago, we saw the Galaxy MA7, which is giant billion stellar mass black hole. And we saw its halo effect just as the calculations predicted from general relativity. Well, I know they’ve got a lot of data on our little neighborhood, a mini mark black hole, which has a mere four or so million stellar masses in it. And we’re going to get that image too. So, you see it’s a local boy does good. It’s…we’re going to be able to see the Galactic Center in ways that no one ever thought we could. Certainly not I, when we started working on it, I never thought they could do that with a black hole. But now we have such greater capabilities including LIGO gravitational list. See, astronomy is the place where the windows keep getting thrown open on new vistas. So it’s infinitely inspirational, although it’s hard to write about it, I admit. It’s hard to turn black holes into a storyline. But that’s our job as science fiction writers.

Jean: We’re coming up against the end of the interview, Greg, and there’s always one question I ask. Is there anything you’d like to add before we end?

Gregory: I’ve been immensely grateful to the field of science fiction and science because they are commingled primarily in American culture, first in American culture, modern science fiction, because it shaped our lives. My brother and I grew up in an army brat family and the opening of the skies by Sputnik in 1957 when we were 16, showed us that the world we read and dreamed about and published fantasies about in the SF community was really going to happen. Here it came, out of the blue. And everything changed. The high school curriculum changed. Suddenly we were going to high school in Dallas and senior year there was college calculus, college physics, college English, hadn’t been there six months before. The U.S. in those days could turn on a dime and get something done. Alas, not now. So, that shaped our entire future. We grew up in farm country, southern Alabama. We now live in California and are very well off and living on the coast and having great fun. It’s all because we believed in the promise of the future, which turned out to be the best bet possible.

Jean: Cool. And hopefully it will continue to be the best bet possible.

Gregory: Yeah.

Jean: Hello, this is Jean Marie Ward for Buzzy Magazine. With me today is writer, physicist and winner of the 2019 Heinlein Award, Gregory Benford. Welcome Greg.

Gregory: Glad to be here.

Jean: We’re so glad to have you. Your most recent published books are both alternate history. “The Berlin Project” looks at the world that might have been if the U.S. had the A bomb before D-day. “Rewrite” offers a sequel to your classic timescape with a Groundhog Day twist. What occasioned this desire to remake recent history?

Gregory: Because it’s so tempting. There are so many pivot points, particularly in World War II and I as a physicist was very close to the issue of, how do you get the Uranium-235 to make bombs? You have to separate it out from the heavier 238 isotope. And the decision of how to do that, I had two choices and General Groves was forced to make the choice because the scientists were divided and he chose the wrong one and it cost us a year in the Second World War. It’s generally agreed by historians that had we suggested or made happen centrifically a separation, spinning cylinders, we would have chopped a year off the gaseous diffusion that Oak Ridge used and spent $1 billion doing. So, how would that change the war? You would have the bomb at D-day, well, how would you use it? And I use this title, “The Berlin Project” because that’s what the scientists in the project called it the first few years because the target was Berlin. Groves said that was too obvious.

So he called it the Manhattan Project and opened an office in Manhattan to give the excuse of, well, of course it was near Columbia University where all his work was done, but still they were always focused on Berlin. So, that was just too tempting because I was a postdoc for Edward Teller at Livermore for two years and then a staff member. He offered me a staff position which I took before I went to UC Irvine. And Teller told me all these delicious stories about the Manhattan Project. And I knew so many of them. The woman who helped me to do physics at UC San Diego, Maria Kepert Mayor, when I was working on problems with her and did a bunch of nuclear physics, again for my thesis, she won the Nobel Prize. And she told me all kinds of delicious stories about the Manhattan Project.

She was not an outgoing person, but she would tell her students these things, and I have a kind of magpie memory for things. I can remember stories people told me half a century ago, and also how they talked. So, I peopled the entire novel, “The Berlin Project” with people I knew. Harold Urey was on my thesis committee, all of this kind of stuff.

And then “Rewrite,” it was because I regard the assassination of Martin Luther King as the one interesting, strange incident in American history, which was a pivot because we know James Earl Ray was hired to kill Martin Luther King and we still don’t know who hired him. He went to his grave keeping it a secret. We know he got paid. So, I thought of a whole plot that ends up pivoting around that and how you stop that. But it’s also a big nostalgia trip about the movies from the late ’60s through the ’70s, the second golden age, which I’m a huge fan of.

So I used all the experience I had working in Hollywood on various aborted movies that were made from my novels to people the first part of the novel with all kinds of lore that you get from the rather seedy process of working with studios. So, it was just too tempting. You see, I’m using my own experience all the way through this. And the point about getting to be old, one of the few consolations, is you have a whole lot of experience you can use. You’ve got…you can mine the past because you were there, you knew it, you knew it in a way that no historian will ever know it because you lived it. And that’s so tempting that I just gave into it. And in fact after I finished the present novel called “Shadows of Eternity,” which is about a SETI library two centuries from now when we have lots of messages.

After that, I’m going to do a set of novels set in the ’80s into the ’90s, because of my long history with the CIA, because I’m just mining my own past. I did a lot of intelligence operations because I speak German and Russian, or rather [foreign language 00:04:48] and [foreign language 00:04:50]. And I used all that. So, come on. Life is essentially for a novelist a whole lot of material. One of the great problems with novelists is they spend most of their adult life alone in a room looking at a screen, not the kind of thing you can write about. So that’s why so many writers I think write about adultery, that’s the only material they have.

Jean: That’s so sad.

Gregory: Well, it depends on your point of view.

Jean: Well, somebody always gets hurt. How has your perspective on humanities possible futures changed in the 50 plus years you’ve been writing fiction?

Gregory: I was also always a Heinlein optimist. I saw the opening of the space program in 1957 when I was 16 years old as the thing which actually propelled me and my brother…I have an identical twin…to becoming physicists, because we saw the space program as a metaphor for an expansive future, and it still is. So, it is the nature of government to turn excitement into bureaucracy. That’s what’s happened to NASA, but now we’re seeing the emergence of the world that Heinlein foresaw in which space travel would be carried out by private interests, “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” So I always felt that the optimistic view of the future has many rewards. One of them is that it makes you think positively instead of obsess about the negatives. There are always negatives. Just read the front page of the newspaper. It is almost all the negative news, but the future can only whisper while the past and the present shouts in our media. You’ve got to listen to that whisper of the future. So, it is also good for your own character because too much of modern fashion and ideas is essentially nihilism of various kinds. And so, I am not crazy about getting that kind of thought into my work, because I think it doesn’t go anywhere.

Jean: You mentioned Heinlein. What do you think he would have said about you winning the award named after him after describing him as a time traveler?

Gregory: I knew Heinlein for almost 30 years and I was a guest in his home and all that, and he was very fond of my work. And my second novel, “Jupiter Project” is a direct homage to his novel. It’s a prequel to “Farmer in The Sky,” which I read in Boys’ Life Magazine, serialized in the ’50s. He always regarded me, he said so, as the kind of person who should drive science fiction because I was a real scientist and I really knew all this stuff. And I think he would’ve been happy to have me win this award. And I think he would’ve been happy with the work I’ve done, particularly with my twin brother, Jim, on exotic advanced spacecraft such as being driven sales and so forth, which has actually gotten real progress made. The whole breakthrough initiative, Breakthrough Starshot is based on our ideas because we did those experiments 20 years ago and showed that this thing was possible. Now they’re spending $10 million a year to try to develop it.

Jean: Hey, it takes a while when you do something new. We, you know, this addresses the next question. You had a long and much honored career as an astrophysicist and professor at the University of California, Irvine. Reviewers have talked about how your day job influenced your writing. What about the other way around? How has your fiction influenced your science?

Gregory: Several times the fiction has led me to consider a problem, such as the Galactic Center. Because I was interested in, and I was writing a series of novels, which I didn’t intend to do in a way, the “Galactic Center” novels. It was…the first one was published in 1977, “In the Ocean of Night,” and then five more such volumes. Because inevitably it seemed to me that the direction towards the center of the galaxy is the most exotic place in the galaxy. It’s like we’re living here in the boonies, in the ‘burbs, 26,000 light years out from this Galactic Center. But the Galactic Center started making stars 10 billion years ago. Our star is four and a half billion years old. So, that’s the Times Square of the galaxy. We are living in Jersey somewhere. So, the inevitably the whole focus of this series, which is about the fact humans discover, that the galaxy is largely dominated by machine intelligence is because they last longer. We tend to wear out and have short lifespans too.

So, I was led to be interested in it. And then in the late 1980s, a colleague of mine, Mark Morris at UCLA showed me a picture of radio filaments, which were 100 light years long, were very luminous. We could see them 26,000 light years away in the microwave frequencies. And weirdly enough, there were a bunch of them aligned like this, parallel filaments that were radiating synchrotron emission from relativistic particles. And I gave that constellation it’s name, The Claw, because it really looks like a kind of a claw. And so I started to think about it and I developed an electrodynamic model for how those were produced and why they’re so luminous and blah, blah. I actually predicted that one of them would kink. And five years later they discovered the snake, which has two kinks in it, which is 200 light years long because the longer the thing, the more likely it is to kink.

And so I was very pleased with that because I actually made a prediction, which is not often in astrophysics since you can’t control the experiments, they’re done by God. So, I was led into that work, which I still keep track of, the Galactic Center is enormously well studied. Somewhere in the next year they’re going to print or finally process an actual halo map of the black hole at the Galactic Center. A couple of months ago, we saw the Galaxy MA7, which is giant billion stellar mass black hole. And we saw its halo effect just as the calculations predicted from general relativity. Well, I know they’ve got a lot of data on our little neighborhood, a mini mark black hole, which has a mere four or so million stellar masses in it. And we’re going to get that image too. So, you see it’s a local boy does good. It’s…we’re going to be able to see the Galactic Center in ways that no one ever thought we could. Certainly not I, when we started working on it, I never thought they could do that with a black hole. But now we have such greater capabilities including LIGO gravitational list. See, astronomy is the place where the windows keep getting thrown open on new vistas. So it’s infinitely inspirational, although it’s hard to write about it, I admit. It’s hard to turn black holes into a storyline. But that’s our job as science fiction writers.

Jean: We’re coming up against the end of the interview, Greg, and there’s always one question I ask. Is there anything you’d like to add before we end?

Gregory: I’ve been immensely grateful to the field of science fiction and science because they are commingled primarily in American culture, first in American culture, modern science fiction, because it shaped our lives. My brother and I grew up in an army brat family and the opening of the skies by Sputnik in 1957 when we were 16, showed us that the world we read and dreamed about and published fantasies about in the SF community was really going to happen. Here it came, out of the blue. And everything changed. The high school curriculum changed. Suddenly we were going to high school in Dallas and senior year there was college calculus, college physics, college English, hadn’t been there six months before. The U.S. in those days could turn on a dime and get something done. Alas, not now. So, that shaped our entire future. We grew up in farm country, southern Alabama. We now live in California and are very well off and living on the coast and having great fun. It’s all because we believed in the promise of the future, which turned out to be the best bet possible.

Jean: Cool. And hopefully it will continue to be the best bet possible.

Gregory: Yeah. The future is all we have left.

Jean: Yes. On that note, thank you Greg, and thank you for Buzzy Magazine.