Today Tor.com posted the third installment in my Talking With Tom series, which covers a series of conversations between Tor Publisher Tom Doherty and some of the authors he’s worked with over the years. In this post, Tom Doherty chats with SF author Gregory Benford. As usual, the topics range from the author’s works to inside looks at the publishing world to random subjects such as, in this case, cryonics.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

DOHERTY: You wrote some poems, too, didn’t you? Don’t I remember a poem about whether or not Isaac [Asimov] was going to freeze himself?

BENFORD: Oh, right. I wrote a poem called Isaac From the Outside. It’s about this curious phenomenon among science fiction writers, all of whom I knew. People like Heinlein, Cliff Simak, Isaac, Fred Pohl. They wrote novels about cryonics, but none of them had a cryonics contract. Fred Pohl has repeatedly been offered a contract, but he doesn’t want it. So I wrote about this strange contradiction, which I largely don’t understand. Because I have a cryonics contract.

DOHERTY: These were guys that all wrote very positively about onward‑and‑upward and a future that would be worth seeing, but they weren’t in a hurry to see it.

BENFORD: Yeah. Of course it’s a very, very high risk, right? But you’re dead anyway. What’s your downside?

Please click here to read the entire conversation at Tor.com!