Timescape
by Gregory Benford
Summary
In 1998 the oceans are dying. A marine algal bloom is spreading, agriculture is failing behind it, and a physicist at Cambridge named John Renfrew has one idea left: tachyons, particles that travel backward in time, aimed at a laboratory in La Jolla in 1962, carrying coordinates and a warning about a chemical nobody has yet started using at scale.
In 1962 a young experimental physicist called Gordon Bernstein keeps finding noise in his nuclear resonance data. It is spontaneous, it will not go away, and when he looks at it properly it is Morse code. His supervisor tells him to stop wasting the department's time. His career, his relationship and his standing with the faculty all begin to come apart as he refuses to drop it.
Most of the novel is neither apocalypse nor time travel but the daily life of working scientists: grant applications, departmental politics, a graduate student's teaching load, an argument at a conference, the specific loneliness of being the only person in the room who believes a result.
Benford is a working physicist and this is the most accurate portrait of laboratory life the genre has produced.
Around four hundred pages, slow, procedural and quietly gripping. The paradox is handled carefully and the ending is not the one the setup promises.
Renfrew's half is bleaker and quieter: a scientist in a country running out of food, trying to get beam time from a committee that has stopped believing anything will work.
Best for readers who want science fiction about how science is actually done, and a disaster novel in which almost nobody in the past believes the message.
Historical Context & Significance
Timescape won the 1980 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Ditmar Award.
Gregory Benford was a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, specialising in plasma physics and astrophysics, and the 1962 sections draw on his own postgraduate years at UC San Diego. The character of Gregory Markham is generally read as a self portrait.
The novel gave its name to Timescape Books, an imprint at Simon and Schuster run by the editor David Hartwell in the early 1980s, which is an unusual honour for a single book.
Its subject, a scientific warning about an environmental catastrophe that the political system declines to act on, was written before climate change entered public argument and has been read against it ever since.