Charles Stross Quotes
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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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I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!
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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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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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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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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
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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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'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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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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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 have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance.
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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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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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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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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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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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'Didn’t I have you executed last week?''I very much doubt. It.'
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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.
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Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
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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.