Top 100 Quotes About Stross
#1. Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.
Charles Stross
#2. 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.
Charles Stross
#3. Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He's absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We're keeping him here because he's not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he's confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher -
Charles Stross
#4. You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.
Charles Stross
#5. They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.
Charles Stross
#6. Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... )
Charles Stross
#8. Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
#9. Money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
Charles Stross
#10. Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.
Charles Stross
#11. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can't always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.
Charles Stross
#12. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago - your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
Charles Stross
#13. There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.
Charles Stross
#14. Wait - something's gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)
Charles Stross
#15. I reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, "do I want to be remembered for this?" before I get to the point of spending a year on it.
Charles Stross
#16. My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
Charles Stross
#17. The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.
Randall E. Stross
#18. Superman, Iron Man, Batman" - Flyaway Hair winces visibly - "you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.
Charles Stross
#19. Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.
Charles Stross
#20. Pubs are, disturbingly, where I hatch most of my best idea-sculptures: possibly it's something to do with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or maybe it's just having company to yack at.
Charles Stross
#21. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.
Charles Stross
#22. 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.
Charles Stross
#23. I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart's desire
Charles Stross
#24. Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
Charles Stross
#25. But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.
Charles Stross
#26. You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason.
Charles Stross
#27. I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)
Charles Stross
#28. A young filly is leading her mater in. They're both wearing green wellies, and there's something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series.
Charles Stross
#29. I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
Charles Stross
#30. If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing ...
Charles Stross
#31. Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.
Charles Stross
#32. Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
Charles Stross
#33. 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.
Charles Stross
#34. And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted.
Charles Stross
#35. I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
Charles Stross
#36. Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
Charles Stross
#37. We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
Charles Stross
#38. 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.
Charles Stross
#39. Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.'
I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.
Charles Stross
#40. you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?
Charles Stross
#41. They never tell you how heavy a corpse is in training school.
Charles Stross
#42. I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .
Charles Stross
#43. I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
Charles Stross
#44. Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.
Charles Stross
#45. When you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error.
Charles Stross
#46. What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.
Charles Stross
#48. There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if
Charles Stross
#49. A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.
Charles Stross
#50. I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.
Charles Stross
#51. There isn't very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn't get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.
Charles Stross
#52. We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.
Charles Stross
#53. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.
Charles Stross
#54. They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not
Charles Stross
#55. I stared at him. You're a bat, Rudi! She's a mermaid. What were you thinking?
Charles Stross
#56. The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.
Charles Stross
#57. (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it's parenthesized despair all the way down.)))
Charles Stross
#58. The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
Charles Stross
#60. Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services.
Charles Stross
#61. The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.
Charles Stross
#62. I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
Charles Stross
#63. if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you're supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help.
Charles Stross
#64. 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
#65. 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?
Charles Stross
#67. [...] Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]
Charles Stross
#68. After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs)
Charles Stross
#69. People want to buy mp3s but can't? Piracy ensues. Then Apple strong-arms the music studios into the iTunes store and music piracy drops somewhat. The same, I believe, is also happening with ebooks.
Charles Stross
#70. I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).
Charles Stross
#71. Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.
Charles Stross
#72. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#73. What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet ...
Charles Stross
#74. I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
Charles Stross
#75. I try not to notice the exploded eyeballs or the ruptured tongue bursting through the blackened lips. This job is quite gross enough as it is without adding my own dry heaves to the mess.
Charles Stross
#76. Sorry, I should have warned you. Apologies are the keystone of an enduring relationship. Failing to apologize for mistakes, or getting onto a treadmill of belittling insults, is a bad warning sign. So far we've avoided it, but .
Charles Stross
#77. The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?
Charles Stross
#78. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.
Charles Stross
#79. For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.
Charles Stross
#80. This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.
Charles Stross
#81. The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
Charles Stross
#82. One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.
Charles Stross
#83. The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.
Charles Stross
#84. 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!
Charles Stross
#85. When you're sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.
Charles Stross
#86. Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
#87. Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
Charles Stross
#88. She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking.
Charles Stross
#89. Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way -
Charles Stross
#90. No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.
Charles Stross
#91. For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don't own a car, and speed bumps
Charles Stross
#92. Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened.
Charles Stross
#94. They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter.
Charles Stross
#95. And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.
Charles Stross
#96. I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing match with an organization that is a de-facto gigadollar-turnover multinational!
Charles Stross
#97. I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.
Charles Stross
#98. Scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.
Charles Stross
#99. Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You're the expert in Visio, aren't you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while.
Charles Stross
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