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

Gregory Benford

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" I like audacious ideas. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite. "

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

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Gregory Benford

" Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. "

Gregory Benford

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

" 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