Stross Quotes & Sayings

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

Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control. — Charles Stross

Writers block: when I get it, it's because my subconscious spotted that I'd make a huge structural mistake in constructing a novel before my conscious mind became aware of it, and threw on the brakes. So I've learned not to sweat it: take two days off, then back up a chapter, read through, and try to work out why I'm suddenly uneasy about continuing. — Charles Stross

Demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it. — Charles Stross

My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world — Charles Stross

(What band does the necromancer dance to? Boney M.) — Charles Stross

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible). — Charles Stross

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! — Charles Stross

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn't thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares. — Charles Stross

A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment
with its redefinition of personhood
is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery. — Charles Stross

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet? — Charles Stross

The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle. — Charles Stross

My agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American - I'm sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I'm quite out of touch with what's going on in UK publishing. — Charles Stross

And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted. — Charles Stross

You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. — 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

I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don't think I've ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom - off-limits if I value my life. — 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

if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you're supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help. — Charles Stross

There isn't very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn't get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control. — Charles Stross

For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don't own a car, and speed bumps — Charles Stross

Olga noticed Mirium looking at her blankly. 'Don't you pray?' she asked.
'Pray?' Mirium shook her head. 'I don't understand - '
'Prayers! Oh, yes, I forgot. Didn't dear Roland say that on the other side everybody is pagan? You all worship some dead god on a stick, impaled or something disgusting, and pray in English,' she said with relish. — Charles Stross

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there? — 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

I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy. — Charles Stross

What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself? — Charles Stross

The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no. — Charles Stross

An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties! — Charles Stross

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat). — Charles Stross

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty — 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

If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing ... — Charles Stross

We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes. — Charles Stross

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader. — 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 you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write. — 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

What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There's only one answer.
The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern. — Charles Stross

The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. — Charles Stross

I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry? — Charles Stross

Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse. — Charles Stross

I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better. — 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

For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles. — 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

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me? — 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

Private ownerships of a ... slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters. — Charles Stross

Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook. — Charles Stross

There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness. — 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

Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder. — 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

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead. — Charles Stross

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. — 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

the geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population's faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to something like ninety million person-centuries-worth of belief. Hence the, shall we — Charles Stross

I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer. — 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

The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff. — 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

One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone. — Charles Stross

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. — Charles Stross

Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet. — Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction. — Charles Stross

Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative. — Charles Stross

They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter. — Charles Stross

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. — Charles Stross

I stared at him. You're a bat, Rudi! She's a mermaid. What were you thinking? — Charles Stross

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff - or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying - when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?) — Charles Stross

The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting. — Charles Stross

We have chickens! And ostriches - they're like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur - that's like a really huge chicken, with teeth - but for architectural reasons we can't let it roam free just yet. — 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

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

My favourite movie is: "Dr Strangelove". (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema). — Charles Stross

It made economic sense, if you looked at it from the right angle; it was not in the Clan's interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop - and drop it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who'd willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even. Bought and sold: We're doing the dealers' work for them, keeping prices high. — Charles Stross

I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on). — Charles Stross

You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now. — Charles Stross

There's an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I'm driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart's town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb. — Charles Stross

I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here. — Charles Stross

Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He's absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We're keeping him here because he's not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he's confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher - — Charles Stross

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe? — Charles Stross

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if — Charles Stross

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children. — Charles Stross

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares? — 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

She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking. — Charles Stross

Um. Oh dear." "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I don't know. Are you thinking, goats are kind of like sheep with bad attitude? I'm not a fucking chupacabra, man. — Charles Stross

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. — Charles Stross

Superman, Iron Man, Batman" - Flyaway Hair winces visibly - "you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals. — 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

The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. — 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

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night. — 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

Today, we see some "file sharing" sites that rely on fans uploading cracked copies of ebooks, and which then make money off those books by charging for downloads (via cash subscriptions or advertising). Again: I take a dim view of this. They're making money off the back of my work without paying me. — Charles Stross

She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons. — Charles Stross