Benford is a physicist by profession and, of all his novels, Timescape is the book that comes closest to showing what the life of a working scientist is really like.

Most of Benford's fiction, however, involves speculation based on real science. The Galactic Center novels, including Great Sky River (1987; see separate entry), Tides of Life (1989), Furious Gulf (1994; see separate entry), and Sailing Bright Eternity (1995), although in most ways closer to space opera than to the realistic near-future extrapolation of Timescape, grew directly from Benford's serious scientific research on the nature of matter and energy at the center of the Milky Way. Many of the pieces in Benford's short story collections, In Alien Flesh (1986) and Matter's End (1995), also involve speculations that developed directly from his research.