Galactic Center Two

This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines. In Across the Sea of Suns, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. In the process, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. The stamp of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey is clearly on both In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. The chapter analyzes the two novels in order to understand how Gregory Benford launched his space epic.