Thinking About the Future Through Fiction - A Reading and Talk

Yael Levin Writer-in-Residence program: 

Thinking About the Future Through Fiction - A Reading and Talk

Gregory Benford- Novelist And Professor of Astrophysics, University of California, Irvine.

Greetings,

Our Yael Levin Writer-in-Residence guest this year is the famed American science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

There are very few writers who combine literary excellence with scientific inquiry. Historical examples include such luminaries as H.G. Wells and Vladimir Nabokov.

Benford is part of this exclusive club. A notable astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, he is also the author of more than twenty novels, and a number of award-winning short stories and novellas. His wildly popular Galactic Center Saga series of novels made space adventure sublime. His standalone novels Cosm and Timescape delved deeply into both the metaphysics of science and the psychology of scientists (Timescape won the Nebula, the most prestigious award in science fiction). But in addition to illuminating mysteries of the universe, Benford’s literary work has interrogated philosophies of history. He is an editor of the series of What Might Have Been series of anthologies, including the groundbreaking Hitler Victorious that weighs the balance of the necessary and the contingent in world events. His last novel The Berlin Project, published to great critical acclaim last year, imagines an alternative history in which the atomic bomb was ready to use in 1944. In a world in which science and literature all too often seem to be at loggerheads, Benford writing demonstrates that there is no contradiction between knowledge and beauty.

The event will take place on Tuesday, May  15th, at 4:00 p.m. in Gilman Building, room 223, Tel Aviv University.

All are welcome to attend.

 Please find the invitation below.