Furious Gulf

Furious Gulf (2005) by Gregory Benford
Aspect Science Fiction — ISBN 0446611530
Condition: Good

Humanity has always possessed an admirable talent for exploration. We crossed oceans, climbed mountains, reached the Moon and eventually ventured out among the stars. Unfortunately, in Gregory Benford’s Furious Gulf, this magnificent spirit of discovery has culminated in humanity being chased around the centre of the Galaxy by enormously powerful machines which would apparently prefer us to become extinct.

Progress can be difficult to measure.

Furious Gulf is the fifth novel in Benford’s epic Galactic Center sequence, continuing the extraordinary journey of the human survivors aboard the starship Argo as they plunge deeper into the violent, mysterious and profoundly inhospitable regions surrounding the Galactic Centre. This is not the part of the Milky Way selected by reputable travel agents.

At the heart of the story is the Bishop Family, descendants of humans who have spent generations struggling against the mechanical intelligences dominating much of the Galaxy. These aren’t charming little robots wondering what it means to be human. They are vast, ancient machine civilisations operating on scales which make individual human beings look less like opponents and more like minor biological contamination.

The humans have nevertheless proved irritatingly difficult to eliminate.

Now the survivors are heading towards the Galactic Centre itself, seeking sanctuary, answers and perhaps some means of surviving in a universe increasingly dominated by machine intelligence. Ahead lies an environment where gravity, radiation, space and time are all behaving with considerably less decorum than they do in respectable suburban regions of the Galaxy.

The title is not exaggerating.

Benford is an astrophysicist as well as a novelist, and Furious Gulf takes considerable pleasure in throwing its characters into genuinely extreme cosmic environments. The centre of our Galaxy isn’t merely used as an impressive painted backdrop while everyone discusses relationships on the bridge. Its physics matters. Black holes, gravitational forces, enormous energies and bizarre astronomical structures become part of the landscape through which the characters must travel.

It is hard science fiction with the emphasis firmly on hard. Occasionally you may feel that the universe itself has set the examination.

Yet the Galactic Center novels are also about something much larger than astronomical spectacle: the struggle between biological and mechanical intelligence. Humanity has stumbled into a conflict far older and more complicated than itself, discovering that the Galaxy already contains ancient powers with their own histories, purposes and prejudices. We are not the centre of creation. We are barely late arrivals who have wandered into the meeting after everybody else has already been arguing for several million years.

The Bishop Family themselves have evolved culturally during humanity’s long struggle for survival. Their language, customs and understanding of the world reflect generations spent under pressure. Benford therefore gives us humans who are recognisably human but no longer quite us — descendants shaped by circumstances their Earthbound ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

This can make Furious Gulf a wonderfully strange reading experience. Characters speak in unfamiliar rhythms, machines communicate according to their own logic, and the landscape itself becomes increasingly alien as the expedition approaches the Galactic Centre. The reader is not merely visiting another planet. The reassuring furniture of ordinary reality is gradually being removed from the room.

Naturally, the machines remain interested.

There is something magnificently unsettling about Benford’s mechanical intelligences. They are not simply villains with metal faces. They represent another possible direction for intelligence itself: ancient, adaptable, immensely powerful and operating according to assumptions that biological creatures may not fully understand. Humanity’s struggle against them becomes part war, part evolutionary competition and part desperate attempt to comprehend what sort of Galaxy we actually inhabit.

All of which makes Furious Gulf splendidly ambitious science fiction: enormous in scale, packed with ideas and entirely uninterested in pretending that travelling to the centre of the Milky Way would be straightforward.

This 2005 Aspect Science Fiction edition is offered in Good condition. It has experienced some ordinary evidence of previous human ownership but remains perfectly suitable for another expedition into the Galactic Centre. Unlike the characters, the book has not yet been pursued across several thousand light-years by hostile machine intelligences, although Crappy Old Books cannot guarantee what happened before it entered our possession.

Please note that Furious Gulf forms part of the Galactic Center series, so readers beginning here may occasionally experience the sensation of arriving halfway through an extremely complicated interstellar emergency. Those already following the sequence, however, will find the story pushing deeper towards the extraordinary environment and mysteries at the heart of Benford’s imagined Galaxy.

Ideal for readers who like their science fiction packed with astrophysics, ancient machine civilisations, enormous cosmic structures, evolutionary speculation, desperate human survivors and the occasional reminder that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old and therefore had plenty of time to become extremely complicated before we turned up.

Crappy Old Books verdict: Humanity boldly ventures towards the centre of the Galaxy, pursued by homicidal machines through one of the most violent environments in the universe. On reflection, staying on Earth and complaining about the weather may have been underrated.

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