Charles Stross Quotes

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?

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.

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.

The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".

What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.

--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.

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

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.)

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

Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

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

The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.

What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.

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.

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

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?

I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

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).

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.

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 ...)

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

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

I wanted an agent who would actually sell stuff. After two British agents failed comprehensively, I was reading Locus (the SF field's trade journal) and noticed a press release about an experienced editor leaving her job to join an agent in setting up a new agency. And I went "aha!" - because what you need is an agent who knows the industry but who doesn't have a huge list of famous clients whose needs will inevitably be put ahead of you. So I emailed her, and ... well, 11 years later I am the client listed at the top of her masthead!

I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case.

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

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

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.

I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.

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!