The literary technique for which Gregory Benford is both most widely praised and criticized is an outcome of his desire to portray alien and machine intelligences — beings that do not think, and hence are unlikely to communicate — in ways which are similar to the practice of human beings. In order to convey a sense of alien language, Benford resorts to a variety of typographical tricks, using boldface, Italics, indentation, underlining, and unconventional punctuation. Occasionally he arranges his language on the page in a manner more suggestive of poetry than of traditional prose. Each nonhuman intelligence has its own unique typography. For example, when the Mantis, an AI sent in pursuit of the Family Bishop, communicates with the higher intelligences which govern its mechanical civilization, speaking through the manipulation of magnetic field lines, Benford renders.....
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