Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford is a plasma physicist who taught at Irvine for decades and wrote hard science fiction alongside the day job, most durably Timescape, which took the Nebula in 1980 and turns on a 1998 laboratory trying to signal 1962 with tachyons. He edited rather than wrote the alternate-history anthology of eleven stories of a German victory in the war, assembled with Martin H. Greenberg for Garland in 1986, with contributions from Greg Bear, David Brin, C. M. Kornbluth and Keith Roberts and an introduction by Norman Spinrad on why that particular imagery keeps its grip. The Final Now is a later collection of his own short fiction. Benford took his doctorate at San Diego, has written for the Galactic Center sequence across six novels, and has published on interstellar messaging and on how to mark a waste site so it stays legible for ten thousand years.