Charles Stross Quotes
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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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'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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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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'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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And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.
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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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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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My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
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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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'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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'The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’'