Charles Stross Quotes
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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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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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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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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
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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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I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!
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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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'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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There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles-it isn’t funny these days-that there were only a thousand real people in the UK-everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.
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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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I have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance.
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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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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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Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
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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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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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Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care.Unfortunately, they were mistaken.
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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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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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Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
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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.
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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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The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.
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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.'