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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

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

Gregory Benford

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford