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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

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

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

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

Gregory Benford

" 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

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

Gregory Benford

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

Gregory Benford

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

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

" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford