Grace Immaculate: A Tor.Com Original

Gregory Benford

Oct 2011 · Sold by Tor Books

About this ebook

A Tor.com original, Nebula Award-winning author Gregory Benford's Grace Immaculate is the awe-inspiring story of first contact--and the beginning of something more.

Earth picked up the signals from 134 light years away. Humanity's leaders quickly established contact with the alien Hydrans, engaging in a cultural exchange lasting centuries. But maintaining a communicative understanding between two very different species over such a long distance results in altering both societies beyond expectation...

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

Religion in science fiction is pretty awesome. I like the slip-in toward the end of there being, after millennia, a lady pope. This leaves me with a lot of questions, but short stories generally do that and this one is very, very short. It was an okay read though. I wonder if this is the prologue to a longer work...

The idea had potential, but the author just broad-stroked it without description and it reads not as a story but just an outline.

I was expecting something else when I read this. Maybe it is my innate disbelief but it just didn't click with me.

About the author

Gregory Benford is an American science fiction writer born on January 30, 1941, in Mobile, Alabama. Along with his twin brother Jim Benford, who like him went on to a career in physics, he was active in science fiction fandom in the 1950s and 1960s; the two brothers co-founded the well-regarded science fiction fanzine Void, which was later co-edited by Ted White, Peter Graham, and Terry Carr. Benford began selling SF professionally in 1965, with "Stand-in" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Since then he has published many short stories and well over two dozen novels. Timescape (1980), an ambitious and well-wrought SF novel notable for its close depictions of how twentieth-century science is actually done, won the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Award. He has won one other Nebula, for the novelette "If the Stars Are Gods" co-written with Gordon Eklund. Aside from Timescape, Benford is probably best-known for his far-future, often lyrical "Galactic Center" novels: In the Ocean of Night (1976), Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Great Sky River (1987), Tides of Light (1989), Furious Gulf (1994), and Sailing Bright Eternity (1995). Gregory Benford lives in Southern California, where he is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.