In the Ocean of Night
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1977 by Abbenford Associates
Excerpt from
Beyond Infinity
© 2004 by Gregory Benford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by Don Puckey and cover illustration by Don Dixon
Lines from “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot; copyright © 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. and of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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ISBN: 978-0-446-50749-3
First eBook Edition: February 2004
Contents
FIRST CONTACT
“I only notify them of your presence. So they will know, I expect, that you may someday come.”
“Why not—”
“Come to study you? Too fraught with risk. Your kind is too precarious. I have seen thousands of ruined, gutted worlds. Wars, suicides, who can tell? To my makers you are a plague, the one percent of the galactic cultures that carry the seeds of chaos.”
“I don’t…”
“You are rare. My makers, you see, were machines such as myself.”
“The stars are…”
“Populated by the machines, descendants of the organic cultures that arose and died.”
ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER
ACROSS THE SEA OF SUNS
“So good it hurts. Benford puts it all together in this one—adult characters, rich writing, innovative science, a grand philosophical theme—it’s all here.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“Confirms again Benford’s unsurpassed ability to simultaneously sustain literary values and exciting speculative science.”
—
Publishers Weekly
GREAT SKY RIVER
“A challenging, pace-setting work of hard science fiction that should not be missed.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Overwhelming power…irresistible strength.”
—
Washington Post Book World
ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD
Fiction
Beyond Infinity
The Martian Race
Eater
The Stars in Shroud
Jupiter Project
Shiva Descending
(with William Rotsler)
Heart of the Comet
(with David Brin)
A Darker Geometry
(with Mark O. Martin)
Beyond the Fall of Night
(with Arthur C. Clarke)
Against Infinity
Cosm
Foundation’ss Fear
Artifact
Timescape
The Galactic Center Series
In the Ocean of Night
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
Non-fiction
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates
Across Millennia
To Joan
who knows what it means
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. E
LIOT
I did not set out to write a series of interconnected novels over a span of twenty-five years. I’m sure that if I’d known it would grow to a million words, I’d not have started. The project grew on me, and I made plenty of mistakes bringing it to fruition. And now here it is, in a uniform edition at last.
I could describe here my inner struggles alone, the endless interior workings one performs before the blank page—but external events proved just as important. I suspect this happens more often for hard science fiction, and more often than most of us would like.
In 1977 I published my fourth novel,
In the Ocean of Night,
concerning an irritable astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, who discovers evidence of a galaxy-spanning network of intelligent machines. Walmsley was named for a friend of mine in graduate school, an astrophysicist who years later politely asked why I’d done it. It seemed a perfect English name, I said. The novel was nominated for awards and I went about my normal tasks as a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.
But my subconscious would not let me alone. I kept thinking of what such ideas implied, and by 1982 wrote
Across the Sea of Suns,
with the same character exploring nearby stars.
In the Ocean of Night
explored the discovery that computer-based life was dominant throughout the galaxy. The British astronaut, Walmsley, uncovered the implication that “evolved adding machines,” as he put it, inherited the ruins of earlier, naturally derived alien societies.
Working with Walmsley set tough problems. I had picked a British point of view character because he was an outsider in a space program usually run by Americans. I had a feeling for the Brits from a sabbatical there in 1976, though I’d been writing stories that I incorporated into the first novel as early as 1972. Still, one novel can trace the core events of a character over years, perhaps a life—but I did not expect how Walmsley would change over the considerable span of Book #2. He ages, gets even crankier. Could he possibly be the central figure in a longer series? Could the readers stand him? Could I?
I finished the book in a mental muddle. Uninvited, my subconscious had begun to present me with events beyond the end of the book. In the first version of
Across the Sea of Suns,
a Simon & Schuster hardcover, I ended on a note of difficulty and defiance. A cliff-hanger, more a promise that I’d be back than anything else.
Then publishing intervened. Pocket Books had negotiated with me to name their imprint Timescape Books (named for a novel of mine), and they contracted for
Across the Sea of Suns.
Months after publishing #2 they collapsed. I don’t think it was wholly due to my novel.
The demise of my home imprint took the wind from my sails. Years passed. Scenes, ideas, and characters popped into my head as I worked on other books. By this time I had learned to follow my subconscious. If I didn’t, I stalled on other projects. Only slowly I realized that a larger series of novels yawned before me.
Bad news, I knew immediately. Series novels must each have a sense of an ending, while foreshadowing more. I hadn’t done this in the first two books.
Or had I? Book #1 closed with an expansive embracing, and #2 hadn’t reached most of its audience yet.
A new editor, Lou Aronica at Bantam, offered to publish the whole series, perhaps five books. Sweating, I took the plunge. After I added more to the ending of
Across the Sea of Suns,
Lou Aronica remarked at the voice of the new material, which he said echoed the rest of the novel well. I blinked; I hadn’t even thought of rereading
Across the Sea of Suns.
It had simply been sitting there, still fresh. Reassured, I set about writing
Great Sky River.
And hit a snag straightaway. A series treats the arc of a figure’s life, but a galaxy-spanning novel covers so much space and time, I couldn’t get Walmsley around to see and live enough.
Worse, the galactic center was the obvious place for machines to seek. Plenty of energy is there, in forms machines can use but we can’t. By the early 1980s we knew that there is a virulent gamma ray flux there, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes. Most of this we gathered from the radio emissions, which penetrate dust clouds and revealed the crackling activity at the center for the first time. Infrared astronomy soon caught up, unmasking the hot, tangled regions. Not a great place to put frail human characters. Yet I yearned to set a long story in such a vibrant scene.
By the time I finished
Across the Sea of Suns
in 1983, I realized that I could do some research myself on the galactic center. I had by that time written papers on pulsars and galactic jets, and had both expertise and curiosity.
Here the physicist collided with the writer. I had been doing research in astrophysics since 1974, and noticed that our own galactic center was abrim with intriguing new phenomena, teased out by observations with new instruments, principally the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico.