Stross Quotes

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat". ~ Charles Stross

It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead. ~ 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

You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason. ~ Charles Stross

So you're saying, we've got a, a shoggoth gap? ~ Charles Stross

WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they're called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical. ~ Charles Stross

And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done. ~ Charles Stross

Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster? ~ 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 reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, "do I want to be remembered for this?" before I get to the point of spending a year on it. ~ Charles Stross

She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking. ~ 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

Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description. ~ Charles Stross

Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table… ~ Charles Stross

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent. ~ Charles Stross

More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market. ~ Charles Stross

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were. ~ Charles Stross

friend of mine who was turned down ~ Charles Stross

It's the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who'll help you out of it ~ Charles Stross

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.] ~ Charles Stross

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph. ~ 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

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

Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance ... Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt. ~ Charles Stross

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases. ~ Charles Stross

Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer? ~ 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

Scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring. ~ Charles Stross

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... ) ~ Charles Stross

Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck's Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we've violated the Benthic Treaty? ~ Charles Stross

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches ... ~ 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

Never bring a knife to a gun fight, I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off. ~ 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

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

(That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) ~ Charles Stross

What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around. ~ Charles Stross

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail. ~ Charles Stross

Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon. ~ 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

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 suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed. ~ 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

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

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 domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows. ~ 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

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

Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast? ~ Charles Stross

Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services. ~ Charles Stross

This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion. ~ Charles Stross

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

A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it? ~ Charles Stross

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it. ~ Charles Stross

Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed, The transom was shut, the staff home in repose; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, But St. Nicholas won't be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorised intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense ... ~ 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

Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli. ~ Charles Stross

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

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

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. ~ Charles Stross

Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off. ~ Charles Stross

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants. ~ Charles Stross

MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY. ~ Charles Stross

AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they're almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn't stealthily dump core in your shoes.) ~ Charles Stross

What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. ~ Charles Stross

I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird. ~ Charles Stross

I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch. ~ Charles Stross

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown. ~ Charles Stross

Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath. ~ 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

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? ~ Charles Stross

There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.

These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade.

(This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)

There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.

. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers. ~ 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

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

Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life. ~ Charles Stross

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability. ~ Randall E. Stross

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used. ~ Charles Stross

It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers. ~ Charles Stross

NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie! ~ Charles Stross

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else. ~ 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

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries. ~ Charles Stross

Down in the park with a friend called Five. ~ 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

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space. ~ Charles Stross

Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card. ~ 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

We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains. ~ Charles Stross

I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America. ~ 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

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

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place. ~ Charles Stross

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. ~ Charles Stross

I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case. ~ Charles Stross

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic. ~ Charles Stross

Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I'm not dead, he reasons; therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be Paradise because I am a sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile! ~ Charles Stross

You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default. ~ Charles Stross