from Asimov’s (1981)
Benford troubles me. He breaks molds, clearly, and in ways I’m nominally looking for. He just does not yet do it with enough force to impress himself onto me as essential. What he does is blend the hard, the truly scientific (indeed, most all contemporary critical appraisals make some note of the novel ways in which his fiction deals just as much with scientists as it does with science qua science) with the emotional lives of his characters, demonstrating their inextricable intersections. Indeed, it’s hard to get more workaday than this story, of an astronomer getting some strange readings, mulling them over during mundane bouts of childcare, and eventually feeling that they can’t be coming from any position available to a man-made satellite.
And that’s my whole problem.
That quick-cut back-and-forth eventually becomes, for me, rote — a paragraph of “doing science!” here and then a paragraph of deeply felt, close-description domestic drama there. The hard thing is, I admit, it’s done with an emotional acuity and lived-in-ness that feels truer than other glimpses of the humane within Hard SF. What is more, that interweaving even works fairly well here, even if the subtlety of the alien hypothesis (and, nicely, it’s given as just another potential scientific supposition, no more or less than the pages of “rational” astronomical theorizing to which we’ve likewise been privy) outstrips the emotional turn, the contours of which feel mapped onto the demands of the sf reveal.
All the same, I’m left cold. I think, if I may tentatively venture, that it has something to do with the toothlessness of the mundanity and interiority depicted. Sure, it makes sense that these bourgeois scientists live bourgeois lives and practice admirable bourgeois values and think what they should think and love who they should love; and sure it’s good to get some nicely observed thick description of these lives. But is that all there is?
fiction review 