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

Gregory Benford

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" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

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

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

" 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

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

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

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" '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

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

" I like audacious ideas. "

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford