Charles Stross Quotes
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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.
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'Democracy 2.0.' He shudders briefly. 'I’m not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.'
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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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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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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.
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'Friendly fascism,' says Sadeq. 'It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.'
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'Didn’t I have you executed last week?''I very much doubt. It.'
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Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.
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History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!
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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.
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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?
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I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
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Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.
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Unfortunately, it appeared that she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.
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She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.
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’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
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Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
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The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.'
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I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
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Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
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Time travel destabilizes history.History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.
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'You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?' Sirhan prods. 'What was it like then?''What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,' she says dismissively. 'We knew it would be okay.'
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I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.