Charles Stross Quotes
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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
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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.
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'Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?''Got a problem.''A big one?''Female human-sized.'
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Luckily, I'm not a stand-up comedian, so I don't get the fear of standing on stage in front of a dead audience: my humorous pieces have to make it past an editor before they get exposed to the public.
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Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death-with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights-will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
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I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.
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'Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It’s about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is.' A wan smile crept across her face. 'Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess.'
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I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!
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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.
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Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
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I am a lazy, cynical, middle-aged guy who has long since come to the conclusion that most historical periods really sucked, for most people, most of the time.
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My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
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I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.
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Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.
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I have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance.
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Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.
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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.
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In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.
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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.
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And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.
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'Do you believe in angels, Robard?' he asked faintly.'No, sir.''Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know.'
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Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
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’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
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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.