Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford, author of more than 20 novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Eater, and Timescape, is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award. Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics.

Lucky Bat Books is proud to be the publisher of some of the best of Gregory Benford’s Books.

GALACTIC CENTER COMPANION, 2ND EDITION

An Authorized Guide to the Galactic Series, Second Edition, which includes New Stories

Death came in on sixteen legs.

SO BEGINS a novella set in the Galactic Center series, “A Hunger for the Infinite.” Now this novella and much other writing about the science and fiction in the series, appears in one volume. Unique in literature, the series comes from the author’s own scientific research. The series took a quarter century to complete, and Benford traces his own research into the strange structures there, first discovered in the 1980s. Critics have described the six novels as “magnificent” by “the most rigorous of hard SF writers.” The series has been called “one of the greatest sf series ever written,” “a major achievement in realizing the potential of hard SF not only as speculation, but as literature,” with “a bardic heft worthy of Poul Anderson.” “No one has surpassed this ground-breaking achievement in mapping the unmappable depths of space, time, and consciousness.”

For the first time, all the depth surrounding the series is collected in one volume. Available in ebook formats.

IF THE STARS ARE GODS

Nebula award winner by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund

Now in ebook, this expanded novel length version of If The Stars Are Gods, which appeared in 1976, tells the rest of the life of Bradley Reynolds fell into place—meeting strange aliens, forging out into the realms of the solar system, always questing. This 2013 edition includes a new introduction by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund — the story of how their two science fiction writing careers grew out of this work, If The Stars Are Gods.

Includes a bonus preview of Heart of the Comet by David Brin and Gregory Benford.

AGAINST INFINITY

New Edition: Includes a preview of Heart of the Comet by David Brin and Gregory Benford!

A gripping, masterfully written adventure set against the violent beauty of a planet in the throes of cataclysmic transformation, Against Infinity is Gregory Benford’s timeless portrait of a young man’s coming of age.

On the icelands of Ganymede, a man and a boy hunt for the Aleph—an alien artifact that ruled Ganymede for countless millenia, Infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now an ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks to survive.

DOWN THE RIVER ROAD

A backwoods fantasy in a riverland derived from mysterious science indistinguishable from magic, by a master of SF time exploration. Lucky Bat Books published Down The River Road, a novella, a first edition of a story set in a land very similar to Benford’s childhood home.

In this new novella, Gregory Benford takes readers along on one man’s search for his father through the chaos of shifting time. In the far future, science and technology have advanced well beyond the limits of time, and though scientists know what’s technology and what’s magic, to others, mystery and danger invade their lives and time shifts in chaotic swirls.

Award-winning SF writer and physicist Gregory Benford takes readers on a riverboat ride like no other as “John” searches for a father missing since yesterday, or maybe today, or most probably since tomorrow.

Read the full introduction to Down the River Road on Benford’s website.

HEART OF THE COMET by David Brin and Gregory Benford

A literary conjunction of two of the brightest stars in the science-fiction firmament.  — Los Angeles Times

2012 Version with New Introduction by David Brin published by Lucky Bat Books in ebook and print.

Gregory Benford and David Brin come together again to issue a new edition of their bold collaboration about our near human future in space, planting our boots . . . and staking our destiny . . . on becoming the People of the Comet.

Prescient and scientifically accurate, Heart of the Comet is known as one of the great “hard sf” novels of the 1980s. First published in 1986, it tells the story of an ambitious manned mission to visit Halley’s Comet and alter its orbit, to mine it for resources. But all too soon, native cells— that might once have brought life to Earth—begin colonizing the colonists. As factions battle over the comet’s future . . . and that of Earth . . . only love, courage and ingenuity can avert disaster, and possibly spark a new human destiny.

Tremendously imaginative . . . a breathtaking effort from two of science fiction’s brightest stars. — The San Diego Union

ANOMALIES

A Collection of Short Fiction by Gregory Benford published by Lucky Bat Books in ebook and print.

Taking Science into Inspired Realms

A Collection of science fiction ranging from comic to apocalyptic, the stories of Anomalies challenge concepts of time, space and science. And all the while, Author Gregory Benford’s characters charm us.

There’s Claire, the hard-boiled, randy spacecraft hack – “Do I look like a people person?” – and her heroic efforts, all in the name of a fast buck in The Worm In the Well and its sequel, The Worm Turns.

Or the puzzle of The Man Who Wasn’t There – can we one day hope to elude detection by deflecting light around objects? Use science to escape society’s justice?

Can we find a way to stretch time out past a single life-line?

Anomalies, the title story, asks a physics-shattering question: what happens if there is a computational error in reality? It’s the sort of question that both tickles and challenges.

Anomalies includes Afterwords and insights by Gregory Benford into his writing methods, sometimes quite idiosyncratic – and into the stories behind the stories in Anomalies. 

In his short fiction, Gregory Benford takes a fresh look at how science and technology alter our world and ourselves. Sometimes irrevocably.

CHILLER

Published by Lucky Bat Books in ebook and print.

“Tense, Entertaining and thought-provoking.” – Dean Koontz….

Originally published under the pen name, Sterling Blake, Chiller is one of Nebula Award-Winning Author Gregory Benford’s most thrilling convergences of science and imagination. And we’re republishing this 1993 novel with a new “Somewhat Numerical Afterword” and a few, selected revisions by Gregory Benford.

If you missed it the first time around, or if you just want a cool, new print version, or an e-book version, here’s your chance.

Gregory Benford tackles the big subjects, all through the lens of science. What happens when cryonics works – when scientists begin to awaken the cryonically preserved “Chillers” who lie frozen and waiting? Benford gives us a story that snaps along through the crazed mind of a serial killer, the scientists he stalks, and the chilling results of science advancing against death.