Benford tells his own story best: "Author's lives are usually quite boring, but here's something about mine. I warned you about the dull!
"The blunt facts: I was born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941. In 1963, I received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and then attended the University of California, San Diego, where I got my Ph.D. in 1967. I then spent the next four years at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory as both a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist.
"Until then, I was an ordinary scientist. I began to write fiction in 1965 and turned to it in earnest about the time I became a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where I've been since 1971. I conducted research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics...and wrote.
"Along the way I've been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and MIT, and served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA and the White House Council on Space Policy. I'm not really an establishment type, though.
"In 1989, I was host and scriptwriter for the television series A Galactic Odyssey, which described modern physics and astronomy from the perspective of the evolution of the galaxy. The eight-part series was produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting, but has never shown in the USA.
"My fame, I suppose, comes from my 18 novels, including Foundation's Fear, Great Sky River, and Timescape. I won two Nebula Awards, a John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, and the United Nations Medal in Literature. Not that these matter; I write because I enjoy it.
"Cosm I definitely enjoyed. It's like Timescape on speed, with the same interest in how scientists confront a big discovery. Perhaps it's more worldly wise, and its protagonist, a black woman, was great fun to build: ornery, opinionated, sharp-tongued . . . nothing like me, of course . . .
"Nobody has been more surprised than I at the success of my writing. I've had a chance to collaborate with some fascinating folk, including David Brin (Heart of the Comet), Arthur Clarke (Beyond the Fall of Night), William Rotsler (Shiva Descending) and Gordon Eklund (If the Stars Are Gods): great fun. I write because it gives vent to a side most scientists suppress: their sense of awe, and speculative pleasures omitted from the dry papers they must write. Science fiction expresses the emotional side of a profession at once important in the world and in literature unexplored, perhaps the most unexamined subculture of our time."
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