Gregory Benford Quotations

Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures.

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.

Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child if they wish.

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.

Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.

Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.

I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.

I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

My brother Jim and I shared a womb without a view for nine months.

Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.

'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.

The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.

The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.

True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case.

We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.

'Star Trek''s insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places.

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years.

Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.

Virtuality - connection without proximity - is a major attraction in both fandom and the Net. Nobody knows you're a dog through the U.S. mail, either. Fans could be utterly different in their fanzine persona, which may be why both fandom and the Net were invented by individualistic Americans.

We have a name for people who create universes - they're called gods. There is no greater hubris than to think that we could take the place of godlike implications.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving.

When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don't have that authenticity.

This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from.

Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.

At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there.

DNA sequencing opens vast ethical issues. We shall be able to know who has defective genes. What will it mean when we can be sure we're not all born equal? Worked out, the implications will scare a lot of people. Insurance companies will not want to cover those with a genetic predisposition to illness, for example. Here lurk myriad lawsuits.

Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.

The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants - preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil.

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances.

Seeing the space future through science fiction can be difficult. Much science fiction of the early era, the 1950s through the '70s, took an expansionist view.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

The moon's closeness is a huge advantage: To make it habitable, we would first have to bombard it with water-ice comets, a tricky endeavor best attempted with the many resources waiting on and near Earth.

As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom.

As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.

It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.

It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain.

In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals.

Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work.

In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot.

Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.

Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans.

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.

In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

Religions do not teach doubt.

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

Ugliness is nature's contraceptive.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

To shine is better than to reflect.

Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.

Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat.

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.

The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury - or at least comfort - so there's a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.

One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average.""For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.

I don't get even, I get odder.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.