Charles Stross Quotes
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Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something-world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.
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You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.
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If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.
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Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.
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Truly the jaws of irony are agape!
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Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10
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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.
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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!
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I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
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No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.
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Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.
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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.
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People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.
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I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest.
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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.
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She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.
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Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.
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Can I remember- 'I remember lots,' I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
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Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.
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The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.
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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.
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Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.
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Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it.
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Any job I do-if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right.