Charles Stross Quotes - Page 2

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .

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.

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night.

Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

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.

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.

--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

We are, after all, homo economicus.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.

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.

You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

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?