Cold Facts Fuel Plot of ‘Chiller’ : To get a mainstream audience for his novel on cryonics, UCI physics professor and science-fiction writer Gregory Benford used a pseudonym.

Neither Bantam Books nor Sterling Blake anticipated the media interest that would be generated by “Chiller,” Blake’s Orange County-set suspense novel about cryonically freezing people for possible revival.

During the novel’s first few weeks of release, Blake has been a guest on more than a dozen radio talk shows, speaking by telephone from his Laguna Beach home about his book, which challenges the notion that death is final.

But don’t expect Blake to be doing any TV interviews.

“The talk shows I’ve done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don’t want to wear a rubber mask,” he said recently, before agreeing to let his cover be blown.

Blake--heralded by Bantam Books as “a thrilling new voice in fiction”--is actually a pseudonym for UC Irvine physics professor and award-winning science-fiction author Gregory Benford.

In a novel-writing career that spans 23 years, he has won the British Science Fiction Award (for his 1980 “Timescape”) and two Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America (for “Timescape” and for “If the Stars Are Gods,” published in 1975).

He even teamed with sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke three years ago to write “Beyond the Fall of Night,” which is set a billion years in the future.

Which is why, when he decided to “carve out a new career writing mainstream novels,” Benford and his publisher agreed that he should use a nom de plume, lest booksellers relegate the new book to the sci-fi shelves away from a broader readership.

So the author took the names of his two heroes--”Blake, the poet; and Sterling Hayden, the actor”--and went undercover.

That means, of course, that there is no requisite author photo on the book jacket. And a Bantam press release provides only this tantalizing clue: “Sterling Blake is the pseudonym for a nationally known physicist and writer” who lives in Southern California.

It didn’t take long, however, for Benford’s literary disguise to begin slipping.

Within days of the book’s publication, Benford heard that someone on one of the computer networks had read the novel and posted a message on the computer bulletin board saying how much he liked it.

“Someone else took the information and computer-accessed the Library of Congress,” said Benford, “and in a matter of minutes he found the copyright” and discovered Blake’s true identity.

Because “Chiller” is set in Orange County, book buyers also have been playing their own guessing game. One bookstore owner said several customers were speculating that Sterling Blake is Dean Koontz, the best-selling Newport Beach author who has set many of his thrillers in Orange County.

“That’s funny,” marvels Benford, who has been best friends with Koontz for years. “The book has a quote from Dean on the back and is dedicated to him, but they probably took those as very broad clues” as to Sterling Blake’s identity.

So now the cat’s out of the bag--at least locally.

Benford said he plans to continue publicizing the book only under his pen name, “just so the book-buyers don’t get confused. I never intended to keep it a big secret, but it will separate the speculative science fiction that I do from mainstream novels about science.”

In what Publishers Weekly calls a “promising first novel” and Kirkus Reviews deems “a nicely paced debut,” biochemist Alex Cowell and Susan Hagerty are the general manager and researcher at Immortality Inc., an Orange County cryonics firm that has several dozen bodies on ice.

After successfully reviving a cryonically preserved dog, they attract a flurry of media coverage. They also attract the attention of Carl Montana, a self-righteous Orange County preacher who rails against the “mindless and immoral technology” and forms an unholy alliance with a sociopath named George: a religious fanatic and brilliant computer hacker who lives through computer theft by using credit cards under a bogus name and tapping into bank computers.

Interviewed in the wake of his radio talk show blitz, Benford said he has received a certain amount of media attention for several of his science-fiction novels, “but nothing like this.”

The reason, he acknowledged, “is the subject matter.”

Benford believes people are fascinated by cryonics--the technology of freezing living tissues to the point where all metabolic activity stops, thus creating a so-called state of “suspended animation”--because it “introduces an element of hope--hope to what is, after all, death.

“Another way of looking at this is to say that cryonics emphasizes the structural definition of death: Save the structure and you might save the person--you might. It’s not a guarantee.”

After writing 15 science-fiction novels, Benford said he was ready to write something different: “mainstream novels with real science, real characters and--most important--real issues that aren’t being confronted elsewhere. This means issues that are either philosophically or socially important, or both.”

Fortunately, he said, “while I was thinking of attempting this kind of novel and getting away from what I had done, I stumbled across cryonics and I realized here was a real-world phenomenon crying out for broader philosophical treatment in fiction.”

Benford, 52, said he isn’t preoccupied with death--”no more than any mortal, I think.” But when he learned in 1987 that “the world center of cryonics is just over the (county) line in Riverside County and was for a long time in Fullerton struck me that it would be an ideal subject for a novel.”

Out of curiosity, he said, “I dropped by (Alcor, a cryonics firm in Riverside County) and met some of them. They’re very well organized, intelligent, educated people. My first suspicion that they were con men proved false.”

Benford said all of the cryonics background in “Chiller” is factual--down to the successful experiments with dogs: “They have reanimated--or revived--clinically dead dogs cooled down for five or six hours. That experiment had not been done when I wrote the book, but I knew people were planning to attempt it.”

Benford, who spent two years researching and three years writing “Chiller,” said he also spent a lot of time researching computer criminals. “All those computer tactics in the book, by the way, work,” he said, “and I ran into a lot of trouble with banks trying to verify some of it because they do not want to discuss it.”

Benford said the character of George, “who kills people for the most part for ideological reasons,” was fascinating to construct.

“Evil is always interesting, and he is the worst kind--he is an extremely intelligent sociopath of great inventiveness,” he said. “I chose to personify the opposition to cryonics in one person because, to me, it essentially arises from one emotion: the rejection of the reality of death.”

To reject death, even in theory, is understandably controversial. Cryonisists, Benford said, “have been attacked by everybody from religious figures to the state mortuary society, which tried to get cryonics ruled illegal; and the California medical board, which for years held that cryonics was not allowed because there was no box for it on the death form--I mean, a perfect bureaucratic logic; the form, by the way, was made up in 1939.”

The academic world also gets its licks in the novel. Researcher Susan Hagerty, who does her work at Immortality Inc. on the sly, is on the faculty at UC Irvine, where she is pitted against colleagues who view cryonics as “pseudoscientific nonsense.”

Benford said he personally takes no stance on the subject of freezing bodies for possible thawing in the future.

“I treated this as novelist, but not as an advocate. I was interested in the people, the drama,” he said. He added, however: “I don’t rule it out; it has a small probability of working. But my attention was not just to look at cryonics but to look at outsiders groups and their conflict with the medical community.”

Benford plans to write more “suspenseful science novels” under his Sterling Blake pseudonym.

“I want to talk about science as it actually is,” he said. “I have despaired at how science appears in mainstream novels: It is the ‘villain,’ almost always misrepresented and a handy foil for a paranoid plot structure as in (novelists) Robin Cook, Michael Crichton or Stephen King and nowhere is science seen as a positive, life-saving force.

“Always the risks of new technology are trumpeted, never the gains.”