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Gregory Benford

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Famous Gregory Benford Quotes

“Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.”

NovelChildhoodUnhappyErnest Hemingway
Book:Shipstar
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“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.”

WorldKindStillsPainFormLanguageIgnoranceLimitsOvercomingEverydayCertaintyCrucialEveryday LifeWretchedHarshnessBattering
Author:Gregory Benford
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“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.”

ThinkingWayDreamTurnsUniverseSocialAttitudeVisionSpringMoodObjectivesUnconsciousNightmareControlledIntegration
Author:Gregory Benford
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“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.”

PeopleIfsHumansLooksIdeasHardFacesCuttingTheoryMachinesExcitingInfiniteChaosEdgesAliensMeatPlotFiniteChillConvincingCrossingsIntriguingCutting EdgeNeptuneChaos TheoryCarver
Author:Gregory Benford
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“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.”

FirstsRealForceSawsFieldsMassPagesLettersMathematicsMathCertaintyMathematicalGreekIronStringsDelicateConcreteEntitySublimeEquationsFistsGeometryGlovesClingingVelvetAiryComprehendingBlithe
Author:Gregory Benford
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“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.”

IfsHumansKindDoeMightCultureSocialSpaceLevelsGrowingProgressRiskCostSurvivalSuicideInsightAcceptableSpace TravelSocial ProgressAsteroids
Author:Gregory Benford
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