People like Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford (born January 30, 1941) is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a contributing editor of Reason magazine.

Benford wrote the Galactic Center Saga science fiction novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). The series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient electromechanical life.

In 1969 he wrote "The Scarred Man", the first story about a computer virus, published in 1970.

Benford was born in Mobile, Alabama and grew up in Robertsdale and Fairhope. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he received a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1963 from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, followed by a Master of Science from the University of California, San Diego in 1965, and a doctorate there in 1967. That same year he married Joan Abbe, with whom he had two children. Benford modeled characters in several of his novels after his wife, most prominently the heroine of Artifact. She died in 2002.