Gregory Benford
I like audacious ideas.
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.
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.
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.
Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.
The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.
The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.
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.
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.
To shine is better than to reflect.Collection: Shining
Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.Collection: Technology
If you are losing at a game, change the game.Collection: Games
They will do anything for the worker, except become one.Collection: Workers
The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.Collection: Mistake
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information availableCollection: Real
Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.Collection: Moving
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.Collection: Loss
You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.Collection: Pain
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.Collection: Real
Religions do not teach doubt.Collection: Doubt
Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury - or at least comfort - so there's a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.Collection: Dream
One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average.""For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.Collection: Average
SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.Collection: Dream
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.Collection: Self
Ugliness is nature's contraceptive.Collection: Contraceptives
Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.Collection: Voice
When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.Collection: Chemistry
Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.Collection: Welfare
(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.Collection: Firsts
At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.Collection: Taste
Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat.Collection: Cutting
In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.Collection: Giving Up
The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.Collection: Details
The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.Collection: Air
Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.Collection: Suicide
Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.Collection: Moving
It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.Collection: Pleasure
No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.Collection: Real
Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.Collection: Technology