American - Physicist | January 30, 1941 -
Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.
Gregory Benford
IdeasDownThroughLikeAllow
'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.
WorkThoughtThoughtfulLeavingMore
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.
QualityPowerfulValuesDevotionMay
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.
StarsTogetherStereotypesInsight
My brother Jim and I shared a womb without a view for nine months.
BrotherViewWithoutNineMonths
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.
EducationFatherMotherBestSchool
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.
WorkImportantProgrammingComplex
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.
PeopleLongCivilizationLivingLand
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.
WorkNatureIdeasCulturesEvenHow
Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.
ScienceSmallAmericaNewOut
Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.
PennyCheapFirstQuickContact
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.
DogYouConnectionNobodyWhyMail
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Gregory Benford quotes