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    Down The River Road
    Down The River Road
    Down The River Road
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Down The River Road

    By Gregory Benford

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    About this ebook

    A backwoods fantasy in a riverland derived from mysterious science indistinguishable from magic, by a master of SF time exploration.— 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGregory Benford
    Release dateAug 15, 2012
    ISBN9781452438733
    Down The River Road
    Author

    Gregory Benford

    Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to sciences. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.

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      Book preview

      Down The River Road - Gregory Benford

      In the far future, science and technology have advanced well beyond the limits of time. Scientists know what's technology and what's magic, but to others, mystery lies deep in their lives and time shifts in chaotic swirls. — A backwoods fantasy in a riverland derived from mysterious science indistinguishable from magic, by a master of SF time exploration.

      ~ ~ ~

      Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.— Arthur Clarke’s famous Third Law.

      DOWN THE RIVER ROAD

      GREGORY BENFORD

      A Lucky Bat Book

      Down the River Road

      Copyright 2012 by Gregory Benford

      Copyright 1990 by Abbenford Associates

      All rights reserved

      Photography by James Benford

      Cover Design: Theresa Rose

      Published by Lucky Bat Books

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

      Discover other titles by the author on GregoryBenford.com

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com for your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      Cover

      Introduction

      Chapter 1. Going Ashore

      Chapter 2. Confusion Winds

      Chapter 3. The Zom

      Chapter 4. Mr. Preston

      Chapter 5. The Frozen Girl

      Chapter 6. Going Upback

      Chapter 7. Temporal Turbulence

      Chapter 8. The Eating Ice

      Chapter 9. Cairo

      Chapter 10. Zom Master

      Chapter 11. The Past is Labyrinth

      Chapter 12. Whorl

      Chapter 13. Pursuit

      Chapter 14. The Bordello

      About Gregory Benford

      Other Books by Gregory Benford

      INTRODUCTION

      Science does not know its debt to imagination.

      —Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Back in southern Alabama in the 1940s, Down the River Road by Mabel O'Donnell was the title of my first grade reading book. It was the Peterson Company hardcover 1949 edition with illustrations by Florence and Margaret Hoopes. In it Alice and Jerry and Jip go on a trip with a donkey cart, and... I don't remember any more plot, if there was much of one. But I remember the pictures. I remember being excited about the concept of reading, but bored to death by Jip & Co.

      Evidently I stored the memory of the book’s smell and heft back in the locker of the hippocampus. When in 1990 Marty Greenberg asked me, a hard science fiction writer, to contribute to After the King: Stories In Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, I recalled that time when the lush banks of moist rivers around Fairhope, Alabama were my fantasy lands.

      Tolkien had written his antiquity-steeped fantasy in lands much like England. For me, heartland America as revealed by science seemed a natural ground. I recalled Arthur Clarke’s famous Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Back in the 1990s I toyed with this as a rule about tech: Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. Arthur’s loud laugh at this, when I visited him in 1995, pleased me enormously.)

      Would a work be fantasy, though, if I wrote from my larger experience as a scientist?

      To me the scientists and engineers of the last few centuries have been the unheralded elite emerging from the culture that has driven modern times. These folk somehow get left out of the equation of contemporary literature. The great modernist innovators - Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Stein, Eliot — saw the novel and poetry principally as an area of technical and formal innovation. They all spoke of the cultures they knew—Paris, Dublin, Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha as a fictional county inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi. He often referred to it as my apocryphal county.

      But they wrote about fantastic matters of the past, not the future. Science fiction is a form of writing but it’s also a way of looking at things - a mode of thought. It requires mental landscapes more demanding and inventive than modernism.

      So, I thought, why not create a far future landscape of fantastic, sufficiently advanced technology? To those who live in that place, it’s natural, unremarkable, yet mystery sleeps beneath. Their advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, to them—yes.

      Yet a young writer would be a fool to follow such theory, I thought when I began writing this piece. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn mostly by error. Or at least I did, mostly—plus the authors named above, and Hemingway and Heinlein. I came from the backwoods, so I thought of a fantasy that just might be about a riverland derived from mysterious science indistinguishable from magic. A place that reeked atmosphere.

      We remember smells more acutely than the other senses because we evolved from a tiny rodent scuttling in the underbrush, avoiding the dominant dinosaurs, living by smell rather than sight. Our big brains cantilevered on long spines evolved from that rat's smeller, so we can’t ignore smells. We remember them, can be snapped back into our past by their fragrant power.

      The South is a smelly place. Southern settings seem, in the mind's eye, to have an almost automatic, fantastic glaze, with strong scents. We readily call up images of brooding purple ruins, green corpses, melancholy figures shrouding a dread secret that reeks of musty shadows. Edgar Allan Poe, the first great Southern writer, started it all—along with the detective story and, indeed, the short story itself. Reading him, you meet a lot of scents.

      The South has played a strong role in American fantasy, but little in science fiction.

      I came out of the South a striver. I moved from the succulent South to live and do physics in dry, crisp southern California. So when I think of fantasy, I see the South. California is science fiction territory.

      Here’s a 1974 photo of me with my grandmother in the yard of her farm, a few hundred meters from the Fish River where my brother and I explored swampy reaches in search of imagined buried pirate gold.

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