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of you who like SF, and not sci-fi, what you need to do is
proselytize about what is good but not getting through in
modern science fiction.
Science fiction has a lot to offer to the culture and
particularly this current moment when our culture would
have to think hot and heavy about the future because the
rate of change is getting faster. Things are accelerating. We
are entering a new era in which we truly have to become the
stewards of the earth. The greenhouse warming and the
ozone layer are just the beginning of large problems that we
will confront. The big problems of the next century are
going of those kind. And if we come out of it a century from
now, it will be because we have finally realized that we have
to actually manage the whole planet. Really we do. We
can't just believe that if we make nice, everything will be
okay. We are going to have to actually take voluntary
control over the whole thing, because our abilities are now
Promethean. And that is the big job of the next century and
the only literature that can make this clear is science fiction
and it going to be a tough message to get over, I am afraid.
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Haldeman: I am spinning a scenario of destruction where science fiction is
the only tool with which to deal with the potentially devastating century
that's to upon us. And real science fiction as a tool for thinking is literary.
Every now and then there is a science fiction movie that requires a three
digit IQ to understand but they are very uncommon and they aren't exciting
the way that literary science fiction is. Yet people are becoming less and
less literary. Even though they are not becoming less smart, there are
usually non literary tools to deal with their problems. What happens if a
hundred years from now or fifty or twenty, there are generations who
literally cannot use literature as a tool. It's not that impossible. We've been
talking about it in science fiction since the thirties - the post-Gutenberg
generation. Somehow it hasn't happened yet and maybe it never will. It
may be that we are hard wired for story telling and that generation will see
science fiction as a modern or post-modern way of doing stories. I would
hope so because I would hate to learn a new trade at this age but we shall
see.
BIO
Gregory Benford-- physicist, educator, author -- was born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941.
In 1963, he received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and then attended the University of
California, San Diego, where he received his Ph.D. in 1967. He spent the next four years at Lawrence
(Calif.) Radiation Laboratory as both a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist.
Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty
member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in
astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter,
particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.
He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and has served as an
advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA and the White House Council on Space Policy. In 1995 he
received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it.
In 1989 Benford was host and scriptwriter for the television seriesA Galactic Odyssey , which
described modern physics and astronomy from the perspective of the evolution of the galaxy. The
eight-part series was produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.
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Benford is the author of over dozen novels, includingJupiter Project ,Artifact ,Against
Infinity ,Great Sky River , andTimescape . A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also
won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for
achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature.
Many of his best known novels are part of a six-novel sequence beginning in the near future withIn the
Ocean of Night , and continuing on withAcross the Sea of Suns . The series then leaps to the far
future, at the center of our galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning withGreat Sky
River , and proceeding throughTides of Light ,Furious Gulf , and concluding withSailing Bright
Eternity . At the series' end the links to the earlier novels emerge, revealing a single unfolding tapestry
against an immense background.
His television credits, in addition to the seriesA Galactic Odyssey , includeJapan 2000 . He has served
as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and forStar Trek: The Next Generation .
GREGORY BENFORD
BIOTECH AND NANODREAMS
If this century has been dominated by bigness--big bombs, big rockets, big wars, giant leaps for
mankind -- then perhaps the next century will be the territory of the tiny.
Biotech is already well afoot in our world, the stuff of both science fiction and stock options. Biology
operates on scales of ten to a hundred times a nanometer (a billionth of a meter). Below that, from a few
to ten nanometers, lie atoms.
Nanotechnology -- a capability now only envisioned, applauded and longed for -- attacks the basic
structure of matter at the nanometer scale, tinkering with atoms on a one-by-one basis. It vastly
elaborates the themes chemistry and biology have wrought on brute mass. More intricate, it can promise
much. How much it can deliver depends upon the details.
It is easy to see that if one is able to replace individual atoms at will, one can make perfectly pure rods
and gears like diamond, five times as stiff as steel, fifty times stronger. Gears, bearings, drive shafts -- all
the roles of the factory can play out on the stage that for now only enzymes enjoy, inside our cells.
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For now, microgears and micromotors exist about a thousand times larger than true nanotech. In
principle, though, single atoms can serve as gear teeth, with single bonds between atoms providing the
bearing for rotating rods. It's only a matter of time and will.
Much excitement surrounds the possibility of descending to such scales, following ideas pioneered by
Richard Feynman, in his 1961 essay, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Later this view was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]