Beyond Infinity

(March 18, 2004)
Click here to buy it!

Welcome to the Gregory Benford web site.
Here you can learn more about Greg through his photos, poetry, articles, and fiction.

Gregory Benford has published over twenty books, mostly novels. Nearly all remain in print, some after a quarter of a century. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.

A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. He won the Japan Seiun Award for Dramatic Presentation with his 7-hour series, A Galactic Odyssey.

His 1999 analysis of what endures, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, has been widely read. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in both astrophysics and plasma physics. Time allowing, he continues to write both fiction and nonfiction. Recently he began a series on science and society with biologist Michael Rose, published on the Internet at Amazon.com Shorts - you can visit this site at http://www.benford-rose.com/

Want to know more? Read An Introduction to Gregory Benford by Peter Nicholls.

New Release:
The Sunborn
With their death-defying exploration of Mars and groundbreaking discovery of primitive Martian life, Viktor and Julia have become history's most famous astronauts. Now, after a series of exploits deemed reckless by space agency bureaucrats, they are being pressured to retire and spend their remaining days handling agency publicity. Fortunately, the Mars mission's primary financier, billionaire John Axelrod, has the political muscle to reassign them to an ongoing Pluto mission before it's too late; but the trip has a price tag: rescuing Axelrod's zealous astronaut daughter, Shanna, from a calamitous exploration of Pluto's frozen methane surface. By the time Viktor and Julia reach the outer solar system, however, Shanna has not only set foot on the planet surface but also established contact with a walruslike native creature known as the zand. Together, the three astronauts must forge a tenuous union to unravel the mystery of Plutonian life. Working from a thrilling premise and with original, speculative science, Benford, a premier practitioner of hard sf, is in top form.

You might also want to read:
The Martian Race Prequel to The Sunborn
For American John Axelrod, it's not about nationalism or personal fame. It's about the money: the Mars Prize, a $30 billion purse offered for the first successful manned mission to the Red Planet. When NASA becomes bogged down in politics and bureaucracy, businessman Axelrod and a conglomerate of backers seize their chance.

But for astronauts Julia; her husband, Viktor; Marc; and Raoul--Axelrod's team of ex-NASAnauts--it's not about wealth or media attention. It's about courage, discovery, and facing the unknown. It's about Mars...and staying alive. For the prize rules clearly state that the winning team can't just grab a rock and leave. Their mission will keep them on the barren planet for almost two years, a genuine opportunity for biologist Julia and the others to research, learn, adapt, and search for clues to the Red Planet's greatest mystery: Did life ever exist there?

This isn't, however, a NASA mission with backups, fail-safes, and Mission Control. The astronauts know that Axelrod has cut corners and that theirs is a high-stakes, high-risk return to the oldest rule of exploration: Succeed or die. Now four people are trapped on a frigid, alien world that can kill them in countless ways. And a time will come when "to survive" Julia, Viktor, Marc, and Raoul must embrace everything that makes them human.

And everything that will make them Martian.

His eighteen novels, including the classic Timescape, have won two Nebula Awards, the John W. Campbell Award, and the United Nations Medal in Literature.