DARK SANCTUARY by Gregory Benford begins with our protagonist getting hit in the face with a laser beam, and from there the action just keeps rolling. The story was originally published in 1979, but it hasn’t lost an ounce of its suspense or relevance in the intervening years. It tells the tale of a curious belter, a prospector content to make the great unknown a home: “Belters aren’t scientists. They’re gamblers, idealists, thieves, crazies, malcontents. Most of us are from the cylinder worlds orbiting Earth. Once you’ve grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a ground-pounder. So Belters are the new cutting edge of mankind, pushing out, finding new resources.”
Tony-Award winning John Rubinstein, narrator extraordinaire, is a perfect match for this suspenseful story. He pulls his listener surely along through the blackness, searching for whoever—or whatever—shot that laser beam in the first place.
Last year Skyboat produced Gregory Benford’s entire Galactic Center Series for Audible.com. It was a massive and masterful undertaking, recorded with the talents of John Rubinstein, Maxwell Caulfield, Arthur Morey, Stephen Hoye, Gabrielle de Cuir, Stefan Rudnicki, Janis Ian, Robin Sachs, Harlan Ellison and the author himself. We are consequently huge fans of Benford’s work.
After listening to the terrific story below, check out Lightspeed Magazine’s Author Spotlight on Benford to learn about his daily writing habits.
Gregory Benford is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society, his fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In 2007 he was awarded the Asimov Memorial Award for Popularizing Science.
Gregory Benford
