Charles Stross Quotes
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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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True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.
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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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Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
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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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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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'Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?''Very long-term-at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.'
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You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots-it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.
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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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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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And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.
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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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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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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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'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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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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I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.
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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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'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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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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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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'Bad day at the office?''It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.'
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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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It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.