-
'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.'
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross
-
'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.'
Charles Stross -
'The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’'
Charles Stross -
Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.
Charles Stross -
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
Charles Stross -
The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross
-
It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.
Charles Stross -
Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition-his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.
Charles Stross -
As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.
Charles Stross -
I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility-woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.
Charles Stross -
'He’s an artist,' she said calmly. 'I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe-shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction.'
Charles Stross -
You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
Charles Stross
-
The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.'
Charles Stross -
He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.
Charles Stross -
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.
Charles Stross -
It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and-stripped of the ability to get drunk on it-wine was just sour grape juice.
Charles Stross -
Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.
Charles Stross -
It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?
Charles Stross
-
I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.
Charles Stross -
I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.
Charles Stross -
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.)
Charles Stross -
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
Charles Stross