-
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.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross
-
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.
Charles Stross -
Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.
Charles Stross -
'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.'
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross -
'Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?''Got a problem.''A big one?''Female human-sized.'
Charles Stross -
My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
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 -
Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross -
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
Charles Stross -
Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross
-
I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross -
’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
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 -
Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.
Charles Stross -
And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.
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 -
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 -
In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.
Charles Stross -
I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!
Charles Stross