Great Sky River pdf

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.
Benford has an identical twin brother, James (Jim) Benford, with whom he has collaborated on science fiction stories.
Both got their start in science fiction fandom, with Gregory being a co-editor of the science fiction fanzine Void. Benford has said he is an atheist.
He has been a long-time resident of Laguna Beach, California.
Gregory Benford's first professional sale was the story "Stand-In" in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (June 1965), which won second prize in a short story contest based on a poem by Doris Pitkin Buck. In 1969, he began writing a science column for Amazing Stories.
Benford tends to write hard science fiction which incorporates the research he is doing as a practical scientist.
He has worked on collaborations with authors William Rotsler, David Brin and Gordon Eklund.
His time-travel novel Timescape (1980) won both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
The scientific procedural novel eventually loaned its title to a line of science fiction published by Pocket Books. In the late 1990s, he wrote Foundation's Fear, one of an authorized sequel trilogy to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
Other novels published in that period include several near-future science thrillers: Cosm (1998), The Martian Race (1999) and Eater (2000). 

Great Sky River pdf by Gregory Benford

After the events of Across the Sea of Suns, small groups of humans have settled on other star systems. However, there is a constant threat from the Mechs, a civilization of machines left over from other civilizations and evolved to see all biological civilization as unstable and dangerous.
Great Sky River tells the story of the Bishop family, who fight for their very existence on the planet Snowglade, which has been taken over by the Mechs. The Bishops are one of a number of families on Snowglade, all named for chess pieces. These "families" are more like clans or tribes. All use cybernetic implants and mechanical aids to enhance their perceptions and physical abilities. Personalities of dead members of the Family can be stored in memory tabs and accessed by plugging them into ports implanted in the neck. Bodily functions, such as the sexual drive, can be turned off to remove distractions. The Families seem to be equipped for long conflicts and periods of privation, continually migrating to avoid the Mechs.