For the most part, I found these stories remarkably forgettable…as well written rehashes of old tropes. Except for 2 (3?) stories that are potentially exciting—and well written. In “Sleepstory” we have an exciting description of a team of mercenaries after they’ve been shot down while trying to bomb a base on Ganymede. They struggle to survive, and possibly continue their mission. During a well deserved rest period the team leader enjoys a virtual reality dream story as a woman whose job it is to analyze the failure of the dike that is protecting a section of the California coastline from the destructiveness of the climate-caused rising water levels. As she takes time to rest from the effort to save lives and property, she enjoys an episode of a virtual reality program where she becomes part of the story of mercenaries on Ganymede.

Both stories are intriguing and exciting in their own right. It’s when they each become the source of reality for the other that it loses me. Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” at least implies an ending. This story eats its own tail to no benefit.

Likewise “Matter’s End” is a great story, in and of itself. But trails off into a wimpy ending with no rational. Benson describes a world with the impoverished railing against the depredations of the wealthy. In this setting nuclear physicists in India have been able to prove that protons indeed do decay into neutrons—after 10^34 years. After an American physicist sneaks into the country—beneath the radar of the poor—and verifies their conclusions, his communication of the experimental proof, and the resultant publication of the news, cause an end-of-world collapse of civilization…and reality…as the beliefs (or the now non-beliefs?) of billions causes the universe to disappear. Once the belief in protons as the ultimate foundation of incorruptibility is broken, and that the existence of the universe is truly temporary, the belief in the everlasting universe is destroyed…the belief that was indeed holding the universe together.

It’s hard to believe that an end of the universe that is so far in the future would alter the belief in the current existence of the universe. We already know, and are unconcerned, about the ultimate consumption of the galaxy by the huge black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Meanwhile, Arthur Clark’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) covered the topic to much better effect a long time ago. [Read the story here: 5 pages, 2,536 words] ( )

My reaction to reading this collection in 2004.

"Freezeframe" -- I would be curious as to when this story was written (obviously no later than 1995) since it has a theme and idea featured in three other sf stories I can think of from the 1990s. The theme is parents interrupting their children's normal development -- usually for their own convenience and to escape the rigors and fatigue and burdens of parenting. Brian Stableford's "The Pipes of Pan" from 1997 had an overpopulated world where parents are allowed few children and, through genetic engineering, keep the offspring they do have in a perpetual state of preadolescence. Bill Johnson's "One Quiet Night" from 1992 has the parents of a squalling infant put it in a stasis box and, somehow, just never getting around to taking it out. This story has a pair of "world gobbling" yuppies decide that, though they had a kid to allay the woman's maternal instinct, they really don't like the demands on their time which take them away from networking and exercise and keeping on work material. (Even this high energy couple finds an infant draining.). Via genetic engineering -- which often shows up in Benford stories because he regards it a supremely revolutionary technology and quite capable of replacing much of normal inorganic technology -- the couple induces sleep in their child for long lengths of time. (They already tampered with the kid's biology by speeding his fetal development tenfold.) They use the old "quality time" rationale for not spending so much time with the kid and, even more conveniently, justify it by the education piped into the kid's brain while asleep. What I found most interesting is the implicit criticism of capitalism that libertarian Benford gives here. Essentially this story asks we should limit or ban certain technologies even if they are freely embraced and do no harm to those who use them. Indeed, they might be worth banning because they provide such a benefit to those using them that, in the struggle for limited resources that is capitalism, they force people to embrace them and corrode (or, at least, change in unknowable ways) ways of human society, biology, and culture that predate them.

"Mozart on Morphine" -- A beautifully worded meditation on science and those who do it. It's barely sf -- the narrator is giving a Nobel acceptance speech after his work on superstrings is rewarded. Benford is, of course, a physicist himself so I assume the joy and details of work are autobiographical. Essentially, this story talks of the humanity -- especially the precarious, normal, biological existence that scientists, especially the hyper-intellectual mathematical physicists like the narrator, share with the rest of us. When Benford talks of the wonders of science he can come up with some beautiful phrases. Here is one from the narrator's speculation that parts of the universe are influenced by entities in higher dimensions: "But what compass do we have, we who swim in the backwash of passing, imperceptible ocean liners?" He also has a speculation that India never developed much in the way of science because it just accepted the presence of death, and did not study the why and mechanics of death.

"Centigrade 233" -- Benford has said that sf short stories often engage in a dialogue across the decades. Certainly this story does. Lest there is any doubt, that this is a play on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the story features book burning and the first title mentioned is Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. But where Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 had firemen burning books that made people too unhappy, Benford's book burning is performance art piece driven, in a world of energy shortages and declining standards of living, by resentment. And it's resentment directed not at all literature, as in Bradbury's world where egalitarianism and mediocrity hate most literature, but at specific types of literature -- sf, particularly of the optimistic sort of the pulpy 1930s and 1940s. It's sort of a brave thing for a sf writer to postulate that some of the genre's most revered writers, stories, and artists would really annoy, with their earnestness, optimism, and naivety, a future they never foresaw. There is also revenge on the Age of the Indulgent Past which has brought the world to such a strait. The story ends with the fittingly uneasy line of going into "the cold, strangely welcoming night".

"Sleepstory" -- This is a pretty good adventure and war story. Against the backdrop of a war fought by Earth's Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere power blocs for the useful chemicals on Ganymede's surface, Benford has the crew of a downed "bomber" trying to return to their base on the other side of Ganymede after aborting a mission on an enemy mining complex. They get picked off one by one until only two of the crew are left. The novel thing about the story is the pre-packaged dream drama the leader of the bombed crew indulges in (indeed, finds psychologically necessary and refreshing to face the challenges ahead). He dreams the story of an engineer uncovering the cause of a dike failure in a future Los Angeles threatened by a Pacific rising due to global warming. At the end of the dreamed story, the dreamed engineer begins to dream a story that sounds a lot like the main story taking place on Ganymede. I think Benford might have been making some comment about how no matter how dramatic and challenging our lives we always flee to the vicarious thrills of living, however crudely, someone else's life that somehow has something ours is missing. However, the a-butterfly-dreaming-he's-a-man-or-a-man-dreaming-he's-a-butterfly ending of the story seemed cheap and out of place even if the contrasting stories were interesting in themselves. (The dike fails because the biofilm bacteria used to seal it evolves to eat concrete -- another example of Benford's fascination with genetic engineering.)

"Calibrations and Exercises" -- I liked this story. I know from interviews that Benford has said he likes to take stereotypical situations from mainstream contemporary literature and recast them into sf situations for various purposes. Here he takes that old standby of the disintegrating marriage, throws in a bit of a resource strapped San Francisco (curtailment of autos as well as the number of toilet flushes allowed), and writes something with the flavor of a long story problem from algebra. (His protagonist is even a sociometrician, and the characters have the names Alpha, Beta, and Delta.) Each section even concludes with requests to calculate various things. The joke, besides the style, is that few of the things are quantifiable or calculable. I suppose Benford's point was that many problems in life don't lend themselves to quantification or mathematical calculation and that to do so is to present a false precision. Mostly, though, the story is fun for the combination of lit story and math problem.

"Leviathan" -- This story is told in a straight forward manner with Benford forsaking experimental prose. Its main point of interest is postulating generation starships that are derived from genetically engineered creatures (in this case, a dog). I was reminded of Peter F. Hamilton's space, but I have no idea if this story predates any of those or not.

"Shakers of the Earth" -- Another Benford story featuring biological engineering. In this one, a seisomsaurus is resurrected in a park of living dinosaurs in Kansas. Apart from the science behind the idea, there is nothing special here.

"Proselytes" -- This is the second time I've read this story of alien missionaries coming to Earth, and I still find it amusing. Most of the alien missionaries are peaceful, pathetic, and have the bare minimum of tech to do interstellar travel (in fact, they are less technologically advanced than humans). The story has something of a more alarming note now than when I first read it in Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy's Full Spectrum from 1988 since it ends with the appearance of an advanced alien race that writes "Greet the cleansing blade of the one eternal truth!". As the protagonist notes, "We thought the Mormons were bad. ... Whoever thought that there might be Moslems?"

"Touches" -- This story of a man playing a very involved game that has role playing and a very complex social simulation wasn't very successful. First of all, the game wasn't very convincing with its complex social simulation that played very short yet seemed to be combined with, on occasion, the action of a first person shooter. Second, the ending, with its conflating of the protagonist's plotting assassination of a political figure with his own pending assassination, seemed a cheap gimmick.

"Nobody Lives on Burton Street" -- This story of the relieving of social pressures by setting up a fake urban area for rioters to trash (as well as fake policemen and firemen to kill and maim) certainly shows its origin as a 1970 story.

"Dark Sanctuary" -- This story has an interesting answer to Fermi's Paradox. It postulates that there are alien races and that they are even present in the solar system in their large ships. They mine the asteroids for materials and are very old and seem to have been caught somewhat unaware by humanity's rapid evolution to a spacefaring race. Not sure what to do with us, they shun contact. An asteroid miner stumbles on one such alien ship, and he first interprets a damaging laser beam as an attack but then, later, realizes he has stumbled into an alien communication system. Like all asteroid miners, he's something of a hermit, empathizes with the aliens' desire to be left in peace, and doesn't reveal their existence.

"Side Effect" -- Despite the presence of some interesting terraforming technology (slamming "icesteroids" into Mars to provide water, volatiles -- the impact crater is domed over and the enclosure seeded with bioengineered organisms -- and to melt the "sub-tundra" ice) and Benford's characteristic bioengineering extrapolations, this is a short, jokey story that involves some altered algae munching on a dog (albeit a dog modified for Mars).

"Knowing Her" -- A sharp comment on the pursuit of youth and beauty. Through several years, the narrator keeps meeting an intriguing woman -- intriguing because of her youth and energy. But her attractions have a dark side. She, in effect, prostitutes herself to get the anti-aging "Subtracting" treatments. When she gets a cancer that can be cured but at the cost of the youthful appearance that is her raison d'être, she has herself put in suspended animation. At her freezing party (which are becoming something of a common social event in this society), the narrator is assured she still lives, but he retorts, at story's end, "She has been dying ever since I knew her." I doubt the remark is meant to be literally true but, rather, a description of the narrowing of her world because of her obsession which prevents her from experiencing life.

"Stand-In" -- Judging by its 1965 publication date, this is early and not very good Benford. It's a jokey story about aliens somehow psychically attracted to Earth where they are compelled to take on the appearance of various mythological creatures (mostly humans from fiction but the one the narrator meets is a unicorn). The logic of the story and the narrator following the aliens in their mimicry (he becomes Atlas) isn't very coherent, but the story is interesting about what it says about San Francisco of 1965.

"Time Guide" -- This 1979 story is very experimental in its prose and structure, but, to me, it seemed like social satire badly shoehorned into a sf narrative. The story is a guide on how to blend in with the natives from various periods of American history -- specifically 1958 to 1979. The guide for travelers to our future wasn't very coherent, or, at least, I didn't understand the point of it.

"We Could Do Worse" -- This is the second time around I've read this alternate history where Robert Taft wins the American Presidency on the Republican ticket rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower. That paves the way for Nixon, as his vice-president, to become President. In 1956, the Republican ticket is Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, and the thuggish narrator is the harbinger of a tyrannical America. I don't buy the premise of the story, though, so it doesn't work for me. I just don't see Nixon or McCarthy as that evil.

"Slices" -- There seems to be some sort of prostitution going on here by the self-described manic narrator. But what the exact nature of that is, what is meant by being a "somafilter" (it seems to be a necessary to making packaged porn fantasies delivered right to the brain more realistic), is not clearly enough explained and that undercuts the story. It is interesting that the narrator has, initially, several fantasies of what his real job is -- assassin, politician, space pilot before he remembers what he really does.

"Immortal Night" -- This story has an interesting premise: a medical procedure that can grant immortality from disease and aging. Of course, that's hardly a new idea. What Benford does is make the procedure extremely labor intensive (unlike, say, mass produced medical devices and drugs which are, in the standard economical theory, partially subsidized by early adopters) and, therefore, available for now, and the forseeable future, only to the very rich. The narrator, revealed at story's end to be dying of cancer, plots the murder of a celebrity who has gotten such a treatment. Before he can do it, though, the celebrity is attacked by two other citizens. The story questions the notion that the rich should be allowed to buy their way out of common miseries (or, at least, it shows that widespread social resentment might make it futile to make the attempt) with technologies the less rich will never be able to afford. Of course, Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain sort of deals with the same question in her engineered Sleepless. Benford doesn't deal, as she does, with the implication that being able to buy such engineering grants a competitive advantage. Those immortal from disease can accumulate more and more wealth between the time of their treatment and its widespread application (of course, this story assumes there will be no widespread use). It's another interesting attack on the free market, libertarian ethos I associate with Benford.

"The Bigger One" -- Written in the form of a script (I think it may have initially been written for Seeing Ear Theater.), it's not that interesting. In 1947, Robert A. Heinlein's "Water Is for Washing" already played with the notion of an earthquake rupturing the land enough where water could flow from the Gulf of California to flood the Imperial Valley and create a new inland sea. Benford lives in California and the most interesting part of the story is the satirical jab at Californians, after the massive disaster the earthquake creates, already pondering what it means for real estate values on the shore of the new sea.

"Cadenza" -- This interesting character study features a woman who knows, pretty well, the exact time disease will kill her and goes in pursuit of the cowardly lover who deserted her when she was diagnosed. She plans on killing him, but she decides not to though the lover is shamed into confronting his fears and killing her at her request.

"Matter's End" -- This creepy story is sort of an ontological horror story that reminded me of both Dan Simmon's Song of Kali (in that both feature the horrors of India) and Charles L. Harness' "The New Reality" (in that both end with scientific experiments forming a new paradigm of reality in the mind which, in turn, affects the actual universe itself; both stories also end with a single male and female figure though, in this story, it's unclear if Mrs. Buli and the protagonist Clay are the sole inhabitants of their new universe; both stories deal with the notion, derived from some quantum mechanic schools of thought, that the observer affects reality). The setting of an India with science under siege because of a series of disastrous biotech accidents (including a version of the Amazonian candiru -- which I checked on and it really exists -- which infects human urinary tracts, necessitating the amputation of penises; giant wasps that borrow into people, and crop blights) was well done as was the alieness, the thin gloss of Western thinking over the Indian scientists who competently, though poor and attacked by mobs of anti-Western "devotees", prove what no other scientists have: the spontaneous proton decay of matter. (I'm assuming the scientific theories of proton decay are accurate given that Benford is a physicist and hard sf writer.) They are proud of their accomplishment but reject the reductionism of the Western mind. They feel there is an "implicit order" underlying the world of quantum mechanics and opt for the notion that the observer influences reality. When news of the discovery is gotten out, the notion that the very matter of the universe will rot away brings a change in the consensual reality and, thus, underlying reality. In the terms of Mrs. Buli, the sensuous Indian physicist who has self-annihilating sex with the protagonist, Brahma awakes; the Platonic forms of the universe assert themselves. Among the brutality of the end (a group of devotees destroys the proton decay experiment and collects the eyes of its victims (we're uncertain who those victims are) and the creation of a new world, we get a reinforcement of a fundamental difference between India and the West. The individual is the basic element of western culture, their death to be mourned. The atomistic individual reflects the reductionism of physics to basic particles. The casual attitude of the Indians towards death reflects a more general view where individual consciousness and individual particles don't really exist, are just matters of perception. That is reinforced when Clay and Mrs. Buli emerge, at the end, as sort of manifestations of a male and female principles. A fine story even if not entirely new its philosophy.

"Afterword" -- The afterword makes clear that this collection is not the best of Benford but a representation of Benford from the awkward beginnings of "Stand-In" to discussions of his basic themes and preoccupations. Benford is an unapologetic fan and writer of idea stories. He sees mainstream literature as lacking any really interesting ideas. (A position he has taken elsewhere and led to some interesting recastings of literary fiction into sf settings.) He also sees some sf as nothing more than familiar props, and Benford doesn't want to be familiar or comforting which, he says, will mean he's not popular. (I don't know how generally popular Benford is. He's a critical favorite.) Oddly enough, he breaks from consensus and doesn't see short sf as the "cutting edge of speculative fiction". He says novels are. "Time Guide" was meant to be deliberately disorienting. I say he succeeded there but not in presenting a story. As I suspected, "Calibrations and Exercises" was meant to be a funny examination of an "antiseptic anomie". "Proselytes" was an attack on aliens assuming to have the politics of "liberal Democrats". Both "Mozart on Morphine" and "Matter's End" were largely autobiographical looks at the life of a working physicist though Benford hastens that he doesn't personally subscribe to the philosophical underpinnings of the latter story. "Touches" and "Sleepstory" (which started out as future war story) explore Benford's interest in consensual reality and virtual reality (and he says advocates of the latter probably don't like to go outside much and overestimate the detail that the world can be artificially depicted in). "The Bigger One" did start out as a radio script. "We Could Do Worse" was inspired by the letters of Robert Taft who did consider Joe McCarthy as a running mate. "Cadenza" comes from a personal brush with medicine and the belief that, while humans are machines they are also more. "Stand-In" is presented as a morale booster for beginning writers: see how far Benford came. ( )

ZB13