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" 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. "

Gregory Benford

Learning

Know

Character

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Gregory Benford

Mathematics

" 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. "

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

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

" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "