Charles Stross Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Stross.
Famous Quotes By Charles Stross
I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s. — Charles Stross
It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds, we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me ... — Charles Stross
After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs) — Charles Stross
Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder.
"You can't be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?"
Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard. — Charles Stross
(That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) — Charles Stross
There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger. — Charles Stross
If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year. — Charles Stross
The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition! — Charles Stross
I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters. — Charles Stross
Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect. — Charles Stross
Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee. — Charles Stross
Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way - — Charles Stross
This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms
translation: all your bank account are belong to us
— Charles Stross
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. — Charles Stross
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry. — Charles Stross
Crawling eldritch horrors don't get planning permission unless they're Trump's hairpiece.) — Charles Stross
And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted. — Charles Stross
People want to buy mp3s but can't? Piracy ensues. Then Apple strong-arms the music studios into the iTunes store and music piracy drops somewhat. The same, I believe, is also happening with ebooks. — Charles Stross
For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes. — Charles Stross
We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. — Charles Stross
Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word. — Charles Stross
I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it. — Charles Stross
Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on. — Charles Stross
The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can't you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars - on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we're just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we might ask them about their gods! What a fool I've been - the questions on which I've wasted my life, and here are my answers - what a fool." She was growing agitated. "Take it easy, Edith - — Charles Stross
I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.) — Charles Stross
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy. — Charles Stross
Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right — Charles Stross
When you're sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention. — Charles Stross
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians". — Charles Stross
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal. — Charles Stross
Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface ... — Charles Stross
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort! — Charles Stross
More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market. — Charles Stross
The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for. — Charles Stross
He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.) — Charles Stross
Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You're the expert in Visio, aren't you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while. — Charles Stross
There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him. — Charles Stross
I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist. — Charles Stross
Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever. — Charles Stross
The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318) — Charles Stross
Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all, — Charles Stross
Sorry, I should have warned you. Apologies are the keystone of an enduring relationship. Failing to apologize for mistakes, or getting onto a treadmill of belittling insults, is a bad warning sign. So far we've avoided it, but . — Charles Stross
I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing; — Charles Stross
I'm not mad, you know, although it helps in this line of work. — Charles Stross
Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. — Charles Stross
It's not as if he's had much of a chance until now, but somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together . . . it's like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you've got to complete while level-grinding in a game you're not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes. — Charles Stross
I have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance. — Charles Stross
MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY. — Charles Stross
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again. — Charles Stross
Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct - except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back - see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics - computerised or otherwise - draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screen-saver was good for your computer?) — Charles Stross
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided
for a fee. (In the event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) — Charles Stross
Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card. — Charles Stross
If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write. — Charles Stross
Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place. — Charles Stross
I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective. — Charles Stross
So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, "I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses."
This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying "piss off, I'm not interested." You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you've been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn't buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know ...
"Done," says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked. — Charles Stross
My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period. — Charles Stross
I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage). — Charles Stross
I was heavily into AD&D in my teens (late 1970s-early 1980s) but fell off the RPG habit in the mid-80s and have never gone back to it; my lifestyle today isn't very compatible with having a regular gaming group (too much travel). — Charles Stross
What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job. — Charles Stross
They'll like it even less if I hear any words from them, I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer. — Charles Stross
Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they're some of the most dangerous folks you can meet ... Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name - Dadaist. It's a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don't give him anything he might mistake for an audience."
Charles Stross, "Iron Sunrise. — Charles Stross
IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head - but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship. — Charles Stross
The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it? — Charles Stross
Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon. — Charles Stross
But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place. — Charles Stross
Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds - and then taking their mess right on the chin. — Charles Stross
I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us. — Charles Stross
Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy? — Charles Stross
When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they're agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers - not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble - but at the back end, we're in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers' biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency - sorry, — Charles Stross
a man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men — Charles Stross
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. — Charles Stross
I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs — Charles Stross
They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter. — Charles Stross
A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? — Charles Stross
Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off. — Charles Stross
Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life. — Charles Stross
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.] — Charles Stross
I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others. — Charles Stross
Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera. — Charles Stross
friend of mine who was turned down — Charles Stross
The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, — Charles Stross
Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can't always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake. — Charles Stross
Loose lips don't merely sink ships, they summon krakens with too many tentacles. — Charles Stross
I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism. — Charles Stross
you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you? — Charles Stross
Fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment. — Charles Stross
It turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings. Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come. — Charles Stross
I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life. — Charles Stross
First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness. — Charles Stross
This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion. — Charles Stross
There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system -- which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil ... — Charles Stross
the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But — Charles Stross
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. — Charles Stross
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy. — Charles Stross
There's no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder. — Charles Stross
A young filly is leading her mater in. They're both wearing green wellies, and there's something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series. — Charles Stross