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" 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. "

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

Gregory Benford

Chemistry

True

Together

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I like audacious ideas. "

Gregory Benford

Audacious

Ideas

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

Science

Reflection

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

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

" 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. "

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