Backscatter

Gregory Benford is an American science fiction writer born on January 30, 1941, in Mobile, Alabama. Along with his twin brother Jim Benford, who like him went on to a career in physics, he was active in science fiction fandom in the 1950s and 1960s; the two brothers co-founded the well-regarded science fiction fanzine Void, which was later co-edited by Ted White, Peter Graham, and Terry Carr. Benford began selling SF professionally in 1965, with "Stand-in" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Since then he has published many short stories and well over two dozen novels. Timescape (1980), an ambitious and well-wrought SF novel notable for its close depictions of how twentieth-century science is actually done, won the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Award. He has won one other Nebula, for the novelette "If the Stars Are Gods" co-written with Gordon Eklund. Aside from Timescape, Benford is probably best-known for his far-future, often lyrical "Galactic Center" novels: In the Ocean of Night (1976), Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Great Sky River (1987), Tides of Light (1989), Furious Gulf (1994), and Sailing Bright Eternity (1995). Gregory Benford lives in Southern California, where he is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.