Gregory Benford: Timescape

The President had finished. Gordon stood. He walked to the dais on wooden feet.

“The Enrico Fermi Prize for—”

He could not read the citation on it. The faces hung before him. Eyes. The glaring light—

He began to speak.

He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come. Words caught in his throat. He went on. And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.

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.