Timescape - Gregory Benford, Hilary Benford Page 0,180

imagination.” He sees irrealism as the literary equivalent of the theoretical physicist’s gedanken experiment, an exploration of “what would or should or could be” by examining the world “in the warped mirror of possibilities,” and remarks on the relationship between this sort of literature and science fiction.

By the end of Timescape, science and “irrealism” have blended in such a way that the difference between objective, scientific reality and subjective “irreality” is virtually obliterated. The theory that a time paradox of sufficient magnitude triggers a split into alternate universes has been developed in a methodical, analytical, scientific way. But we are also given the human experience of that shift in terms of familiar, subjective, human illusions. After John Renfrew has spent two days alone in his lab, increasingly ill from the biochemical changes in his environment and drifting “in a world where t was time and tea was brine and x for space,” he is groping for an explanation of his odd perception: “Maybe the weight loss explained why the room rippled and stretched as he watched. Christ, he was tired” (Chapter 45). At this point, Renfrew—who has been dogged and dedicated to the task—unimaginative and undistinguished by anything but his determination, decides that the whole exercise is “bloody boring” and begins transmitting personal comments in ordinary sentences, quite unlike his earlier transmissions. He is, one might say, “a changed man.” There are perfectly acceptable psychological reasons for his actions, and the rippling of the room could be an illusion. But we have been alerted to the possibility of an objective manifestation of the time paradox, a sign of the splitting of the universe into two. Here the objective reality is indistinguishable from the psychological one.

The novel’s conclusion leaves us still unable to distinguish illusion from reality, once we have accepted as plausible the idea that time paradoxes will repeatedly change reality without warning. The jump from Penny to Marsha is explained without resorting to alternate universes, but the dizzying possibility is kept before us. In the crowd that is witnessing the ceremony in which Gordon’s work on tachyons is rewarded, “his mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history” (Chapter 46). The last mention of his mother was two chapters and eleven years earlier. They were a continent apart and estranged by the conflict over Penny, she was ill, and the pressure of his scientific work kept him from going to see her. Now he is excited by her presence; has the estrangement lasted all these years, then? But no: “in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again.… The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary.… Still, something in her alert gaze—The room wavered, light blurred into pools.” In the few remaining paragraphs of the novel, his mother’s presence is neither explained nor explained away. Is she a reality in yet another alternate universe? Is she an illusion born of his wishful thinking?

Counterpointed with Gordon’s thoughts about his mother is the President’s speech about the significance of Gordon’s work, on “an immense … scale, echoing the increasing connection … between the microscopic and the macroscopic.” Timescape shows a similar connection between the human scale of things and the cosmic with a combination of techniques from mainstream “irrealism” and from hard science fiction. Timescape’s merging of science and literature is consistent with the view Benford expressed in “Why Is There So Little Science in Literature?” that “science is … like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.”

Timescape’s central image of waves encompasses the whole range of possible ways of seeing, including the common sense of objective reality, the physical scientist’s and the postmodernist’s changing maps of reality, and the psychologist’s subjective illusion. There is the ocean wave that Gordon rides successfully for the first time after JFK’s survival of the assassination attempt signals the division of the universe. There are the waves that are a kind of provisional mapping of subatomic reality in quantum mechanics. There is the wavering, rippling effect of flickering consciousness that means uncertain vision and so suggests human illusion. There are the waves that are characteristic of the new view of time as a “timescape [that] rippled with waves” (Chapter 46). In its depth and range, the image is characteristic of Timescape, in which Benford shows that though they may sometimes seem to be at odds, the literary quest for inner truth and the scientific quest for the truths of the physical universe are not ultimately separable.

[Note: Parts of this discussion were published in “Science and Humanism in Gregory Benford’s Timescape,” Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 15 (1988), 295–310]

TO RICHARD CURTIS

WITH THANKS

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to acknowledge warmly the contribution made by my sister-in-law, Hilary Foister Benford, to this book. She contributed significantly to the manuscript, bringing to it her special qualities of interest in people. Certain characters are in part her creation. As a native of England and a graduate of Cambridge University, she gave invaluable help in developing and maintaining a consistent British idiom. Without her contribution this would be a quite different book.

GREGORY BENFORD

Cambridge

August, 1979

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For technical discussions I am indebted to Doctors Riley Newman, David Book and Sidney Coleman.

Many facets of this work were improved by my wife, Joan Abbe. Her patience and support, as well as that of my children, Alyson and Mark, were invaluable.

For editing and work on the final draft I thank Asenath Hammond. I am indebted to David and Marilee Samuelson, Charles Brown, Malcolm Edwards, Richard Curtis, Lawrence Littenberg and especially David Hartwell for comments on the manuscript.

Many scientific elements in this novel are true. Others are speculative, and thus may well prove false. My aim has been to illuminate some outstanding philosophical difficulties in physics. If the reader emerges with the conviction that time represents a fundamental riddle in modern physics, this book will have served its purpose.

GREGORY BENFORD

Cambridge

August, 1979

BANTAM BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD

HEART OF THE COMET (WITH DAVID BRIN)

TIMESCAPE

About the Author

GREGORY BENFORD is one of the most accomplished hard SF authors of our time. A professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, he uses the most recent authentic, thoroughly grounded science. As a stylist he has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He has written over a dozen novels, including Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Across the Sea of Suns, Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), In the Ocean of Night, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity and a collection of short stories, In Alien Flesh. Gregory Benford lives in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife and two children.